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Women Filmmakers: Home

Writer and film critic Nell Minow says, “Feminism is the belief in justice and equality regardless of gender. When applied to film criticism, that standard means making sure women’s voices, stories and perspectives are reflected in every aspect of film and writing about film." 

Here is a beginning guide to films and books on women filmmakers and feminist cinema. To learn more about accessing streaming media through The Evergreen State College Library, please see our Media Streaming Guide.

If there is  a film not represented at our library that you think we should have, please send the Library a request and we will look into purchasing that movie.

 

Films

Cleo from 5 to 7 cover imageCléo from 5 to 7 (directed by Agnès Varda, 1962)

Streaming available at Kanopy (expires 04/13/21)

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand (THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG) and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

 

 

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (directed by Chantal Akerman, 1975)

DVD available at The Evergreen State College Library

A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, JEANNE DIELMAN is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.

 

The Watermelon Woman (directed by Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

DVD available at The Evergreen State College Library

Cheryl Dunye’s bitingly funny, deeply personal feature debut is a landmark look at the black lesbian experience. The director herself stars as Cheryl, a twenty-something lesbian struggling to make a documentary about Fae Richards, a beautiful and elusive 1930s black film actress popularly known as the Watermelon Woman. While uncovering the meaning of Richards’s life, Cheryl simultaneously experiences a total upheaval in her own when she embarks on an affair with a white woman (Guinevere Turner). Soon, each answer Cheryl discovers about the Watermelon Woman evokes a flurry of new questions about herself and her future.

 

Born In Flames (directed by Lizzie Borden, 1983)

Streaming available at Kanopy (expires 06/04/2021)

The movie that rocked the foundations of the early Indie film world, this provocative, thrilling and still-relevant classic is a comic fantasy of female rebellion set in America ten years after the Second American Revolution. When Adelaide Norris, the black radical founder of the Woman's Army, is mysteriously killed, a diverse coalition of women - across all lines of race, class, and sexual preference - emerges to blow the System apart.

 

 

Meek's Cutoff (directed by Kelly Reichardt, 2011)

Streaming available at Alexander Street

The year is 1845, the earliest days of the Oregon Trail, and a wagon train of three families has hired mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a shortcut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the coming days, the emigrants face the scourges of hunger, thirst and their own lack of faith in one another's instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as a natural born enemy.

 

Winter's Bone (directed by Debra Granik, 2010)

Streaming available at Swank (expires 7/31/2021)

Ozarks teen Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) risks her life to find her criminal father after he puts up the family home to cover his bail and then vanishes without a trace. Should Ree fail to locate him quickly, her family will be homeless.

 

 

 

The Farewell cast

The Farewell (directed by Lulu Wang, 2019)

Blu-Ray Video available at The Evergreen State College Library

Billi's(Awkwafina) family returns to China under the guise of a fake wedding to stealthily say goodbye to their beloved matriarch -- the only person that doesn't know she only has a few weeks to live.

 

 

 

WandaWanda (directed by Barbara Loden, 1970)

DVD available through Summit Libraries

With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.

 

Christopher Strong Christopher Strong (directed by Dorothy Arzner, 1933)

 DVD available through Summit Libraries

Christopher Strong is a 1933 American pre-Code romantic drama film produced by RKO and directed by Dorothy Arzner. It is a tale of illicit love among the English aristocracy and stars Colin Clive and Katharine Hepburn. The screenplay by Zoë Akins is an adaptation of   the 1932 British novel Christopher Strong by Gilbert Frankau.

 

 

Daughters Of The Dust (directed by Julie Dash, 1991)

DVD available through The Evergreen State College Library

Julie Dash’s rapturous vision of black womanhood and vanishing ways of life in the turn-of-the-century South was the first film directed by an African American woman to receive a wide release in United States. In 1902, a multigenerational family in the Gullah community on the Sea Islands off of South Carolina—former West African slaves who carried on many of their ancestors’ Yoruba traditions—struggle to maintain their cultural heritage and folklore while contemplating a migration to the mainland, even further from their roots. Awash in gorgeously poetic, sun-dappled images at once dreamlike and precise, DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST forges a radical new visual language rooted in black femininity and the rituals of Gullah culture.

 

DaisiesDaisies (directed by Vera Chytilová, 1966)

Streaming available at Kanopy (04/01/2021)

Maybe the Czech New Wave's most anarchic entry, Vera Chytilova's absurdist farce follows the misadventures of two brash young women. Believing the world to be "spoiled," they embark on a series of pranks in which nothing--food, clothes, men, war--is taken seriously. DAISIES is an aesthetically and politically adventurous film that's widely considered one of the great works of feminist cinema.

Further Reading

Streaming Media Platforms

NOTE: If you are using a streaming video for a class, please contact the library to make sure it will remain available for the duration of the quarter.

Daniel J. Evans Library - Room 2300 - 2700 Evergreen Parkway, NE. Olympia, WA 98501 - 360-867-6250