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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)

DVD available at Evergreen Library

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.

 

DaisiesMeshes Of The Afternoon (directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943)

Streaming available at Alexander Street 

Cinematic trance-maker Maya Deren and her husband Alexander Hammid launched an underground revolution with this avant-garde landmark—shot in their Hollywood home, but a world away from the commercial gloss of the dream factory—in which a cascade of uncanny images evoke a woman’s fractured psyche.

 

Working GIrls (directed by Lizzie Borden, 1986)

Streaming available at Films On Demand

Sex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Lizzie Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession. Inspired by the experiences of the sex workers Borden met while making her underground feminist landmark Born in Flames, Working Girls reveals the textures of a day in the life of Molly (Louise Smith), a photographer working part-time in a Manhattan brothel, as she juggles a steady stream of clients, balances nurturing relationships with her coworkers with the demands of an ambitious madam, and above all fights to maintain her sense of self in a business in which the line between the personal and the professional is all too easily blurred. In viewing prostitution through the lens of labor, Borden boldly desensationalizes the subject, offering an empathetic, humanizing, often humorous depiction of women for whom this work is just another day at the office.

 

ClemintineClementine (directed by Lara Jean Gallagher, 2019)

Streaming Available At Kanopy

Reeling from a one-sided breakup, anguished Karen (Otmara Marrero) flees Los Angeles for her ex's idyllic lake house in the Pacific Northwest. There, she becomes entangled with a mysterious, alluring younger woman (Sydney Sweeney), whom she cannot seem to resist. Equal parts psychological thriller and sexual coming-of-age story, CLEMENTINE is a tense rumination on who to love and how to let go.

 

 

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.

 

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

Streaming Available at Kanopy

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.

 

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

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 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.

 

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.

 

 

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.

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