WOMEN FILMMAKERS

1975 film by Chantal Akerman

Two teenage girls embark on a series of destructive pranks in which they consume and destroy the world around them.

1985 film directed by Agnès Varda

Based on the novel of the same name by Oleksandr Dovzhenko. About the childhood of the famous Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was born on the ancient lands of Chernihiv, along the banks the Desna. The film consists of two parts. The first is the world shown through the impressions of the six-year-old Sashko. The second is the recollections and reasoning of Sashko, now an elderly colonel who liberates his native village during the war.

1977 film by Larisa Shepitko

On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.

1980 film by Helma Sanders-Brahms

Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Engels as well as the pioneering nonfiction film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895).

As an awkward idealistic high school teacher begins her first job in the city, things turn out to be much tougher than she had imagined.

2016 film by Maren Ade

1962 film by Agnès Varda

An experimental retelling of the story of Adam and Eve which then progresses into an allegorical depiction of the loss of innocence.

After twelve years of imprisonment by their own parents, two Iranian sisters are finally released by social workers to face the outside world for the first time.

In the sixties, in a suburb near Paris, Martine wants to lose her virginity.

A teenage girl with nothing to lose joins a traveling magazine sales crew, and gets caught up in a whirlwind of hard partying, law bending and young love as she criss-crosses the Midwest with a band of misfits.

2021 film directed by Laura Wandel

2020 film directed by Catarina Vasconcelos

Macabéa has just moved to the big city after her aunt, who raised her, died. She gets a job as a typist and moves into a boarding house with three other women. In her spare time, she listens to a radio station called Time; on Sundays, she likes to ride the metro. Then she meets Olímpico, a northeasterner like herself, who has dreams of becoming a congressman.

After discovering her father put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared, 17-year-old Ree Dolly must confront the local criminal underworld and the harsh Ozark wilderness in order to to track down her father and save her family.

This experimental documentary is a compendium of striking images of Eastern Europe and its citizens in transition, following the collapse of the so-called Cold War. Places as diverse as Baltic beaches, and Moscow's snow-covered streets vie for attention along with the citizens of these places as they wait in lines, march in military formation, or stand idle in the waiting rooms of train stations. There is no narration, and no clear point (except the idea of transitions) is indicated by the beautifully chosen, enigmatic imagery. Indeed, there is not even much musical accompaniment. Fans of director Chantal Akerman's aggressively "non-commercial" work are likelier to find this film more appealing than the average viewer will.