A unique film about the Gullah culture on the coast of South Carolina, with a beautiful visual sense and an insistence on discursive storytelling.
Category Archives: Female Directors
THE NIGHT PORTER (1974)
A highly controversial drama about the Holocaust, trauma, and sadomasochism, among other things. It’s probably better than that combination makes it sound.
OLYMPIA (1938)
Considered the first great film made about the Olympics, it is also, unfortunately, a highly effective piece of Nazi propaganda.
CLUELESS (1995)
The most mid-90s of mid-90s movies is somehow based on a Jane Austen novel, and also somehow really good.
SHOES (1916)
A very early drama about the effects of poverty from the first famous female director.
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (1992)
The rare sports movie by women, for women, and about women, plus it’s also really funny and has a bunch of memorable scenes and lines.
CLÉO DE 5 À 7 (1962)
The earliest big international hit of the great Agnés Varda follows a female singer on a nearly-real-time journey through the Left Bank of Paris as she waits on the results of a cancer test, but it’s actually about a lot of other things.
HARLAN COUNTY, USA (1976)
A portrait of a coal mining community in 1970s Kentucky, where the company is king but the locals risk life and limb to unionize, as did the filmmakers to tell their story.
THE ASCENT (1977)
An extremely depressing Soviet World War II movie that is also probably a great work of art.
THE CONNECTION (1961)
This is sort of the closest thing you’ll find a movie by and for the Beat Movement, an interesting exercise but I’m not sure it actually works as a film.
Movie Valhalla 