Women's Work: Essential Films by Female Filmmakers

Women's Work: Essential Films by Female Filmmakers

Experience the diverse storytelling and unique perspectives of women directors in this collection, featuring everything from intimate character studies and thought-provoking dramas to genre-bending narratives and compelling documentaries.

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Women's Work: Essential Films by Female Filmmakers
  • All is Forgiven

    Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve | 98 mins | 2007
    Mia Hansen-Løve was only twenty-five when she directed one of the most striking and auspicious first features in 21st century French cinema, which finds the brisk economy of expression, nuanced characterization, and formal daring of her future films (F...

  • Clockwatchers

    Directed by Jill Sprecher | 96 mins | 1997
    Like "9 to 5" (1980) before it, this crackling indie comedy introduces a set of disparate women united by the drudgery and casual sexism of office temp work. Augmenting the delightfully funny and subversive script by sisters Karen and Jill Sprecher (who ...

  • Duet for Cannibals

    Directed by Susan Sontag | 105 mins | 1969
    In the late ’60s, a Swedish studio invited essayist, novelist, critic, cinephile, and all-around intellectual dynamo Susan Sontag to make her directorial debut in Stockholm. The resulting film, revolving around the quadrangular relationship between an ar...

  • Madame X: An Absolute Ruler

    Directed by Ulrike Ottinger | 131 mins | 1977
    The hard, merciless pirate ruler of the China Sea, Madame X sends out a missive to women, inviting them to leave domestic security behind for a life of dangerous adventure, but when a panoply of different women—including Yvonne Rainer on rollerskates...

  • Music

    Directed by Angela Schanelec | 105 mins | 2023
    Winner of the 2023 Berlinale Best Screenplay prize, Angela Schanelec’s oblique but vivid film transposes “Oedipus Rex” to contemporary Greece—though Sophocles’ tragedy is here distilled beyond easy recognition, with the rigor characteristic of the qu...

  • Old Enough

    Directed by Marisa Silver | 92 mins | 1984
    Eleven-year-old Lonnie (Sarah Boyd) is a Lower East Side kid who comes from money, while her teenaged pal Karen (Rainbow Harvest) doesn’t come from much of anything at all. At first these opposites attract, but then budding hormones and first crushes fur...

  • Romance

    Directed by Catherine Breillat | 99 mins | 1999
    When Marie’s (Caroline Ducey) boyfriend loses interest in having sex with her, she engages a series of new and increasingly violent lovers—in pursuit of self-knowledge and perhaps a kind of transcendence through these acts of erotic masochism. Renow...

  • The Competition

    Directed by Claire Simon | 121 mins | 2016
    The Competition begins, significantly, with the image of a locked gate—that of La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world, offering hands-on training from working professionals and accepting only 40 students per year from hundreds of...

  • The Decline of Western Civilization

    Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 100 mins | 1981
    Without doubt one of the great rock docs, Penelope Spheeris’s headily discordant portrait of West Coast punk—her directorial debut—showcases such hardcore luminaries as X, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Germs. As pure and pungent a time capsule as th...

  • The Decline of Western Civilization Part III

    Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 86 mins | 1998
    After a detour into the high heady heyday of Sunset Strip hair metal in the second film of her essential social history of rock ’n’ roll in southern California, Spheeris returned to the hardcore punk roots of her first Decline, embedding herself amon...

  • The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years

    Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 93 mins | 1988
    The scummy, lightening-in-a-bottle Los Angeles punk scene that Penelope Spheeris captured in the first “Decline of Western Civilization” (1981) had morphed considerably by the time of this second instalment, nearly a decade later: the hair was bigger...

  • The Forest for the Trees

    Directed by Maren Ade | 81 mins | 2003
    Like her 2016 magnum opus "Toni Erdmann", Maren Ade’s devilish debut subjects its anti-heroine to a borderline sadistic ritual of ignominy. Melanie Pröschle (a fantastically game Eva Löbau), a 27-year-old schoolteacher moves to a new town, only to be assaile...

  • Other People's Children

    Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski | 104 mins | 2022
    High school teacher Rachel (Virginie Efira) falls in love with Ali, and then with his 4-year-old, Leila— strengthening her desire to have a child of her own. But at 40, she knows that biology is working against her, and that cultivating a relationsh...

  • Rodeo

    Directed by Lola Quivoron | 106 mins | 2022
    “I was born with a bike between my legs.” Motocross-mad Julia—fiercely incarnated by newcomer Julie Ledru, cast from Instagram—butters up a man who thinks she’s a potential buyer for his machine, when in fact, she’s about to ride away with it. Revving m...

  • Portrait of Jason

    Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
    A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from ...