Directed by Women

Within the human struggle to live and work on a changing planet, questions of value, extraction, and adaptation echo across seemingly disparate worlds. A Common Sequence examines shifts of life and labor through a critically-endangered salamander and plant patents in the apple industry. Weaving the stories of Dominican nuns running a conservation lab, a group of fisherman attempting to live off of a depleting lake, engineers developing AI-driven harvesting machines, and an indigenous biomedical researcher resisting the commodification of human DNA, the film becomes a meditation on the shifting border between the natural and unnatural world, and the dynamics of power at play.

In Our Body, veteran documentarian Claire Simon observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris.  In the process, she questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the diversity, singularity and beauty of patients in all stages of life. 

A selection of the New York Film Festival, director Laura Citarella directs a labyrinthine tale of obsessive pursuit and the quest for personal freedom.

The film follows Ida, who, after a stirring encounter with the French Foreign Legion, sets sail with her own corps of five men, none of whom speak the same language, to trace the route of this fabled troop.

In her dynamic and entrancing directorial debut, Helena Wittmann takes us on a transatlantic voyage unlike any other, scrambling our senses and inviting us to surrender to the ocean's ever-undulating surface.

Critic's Pick!  One of the most awarded films of 2022, Geographies of Solitude is a playful and reverent collaboration with the natural world filled with arresting images and made with an activist spirit. The film follows Zoe, a naturalist and environmentalist who has lived Sable Island, on a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic with a rich ecosystem, for over 40 years.

On May 5th, 1991, people took to the streets of Washington D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood to protest the police shooting of Daniel Gomez, a young man from El Salvador. Through testimony, song, poetry, and street theatre, La Manplesa weaves together the collective memory of one of D.C.’s first barrios and dives into the roots of the ‘91 rebellion.

An immersive marvel of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller as part of the so-called Harvard-Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea in 1961

In this two-part tour through the streets of Lebanon, a colorful Palestinian cab driver offers offhand insight into the region’s fraught political and social climate through boisterous serenades and excitable outbursts.

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.

Filmmaker Maxine Trump turns the camera on herself and her close circle of family and friends as she confronts the idea of not having kids, and explores the cultural pressures and harsh criticism childfree women regularly experience.

Astrid, a forty-something mother of two, struggles to regain her balance in the wake of her husband’s death. Her adolescent son Phillip disappeared for a week and now that he has returned, he faces disciplinary action at school and his toe requires amputation. As new questions confront Astrid from every angle, even simple activities like buying a bicycle or engaging with a work of art, are fraught with unexpected challenges.

This collection of eight early films by Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz proposes a critical reflection on the relationship between colonialism, modernity and the impending ecological disaster. At the core of the collection is a cycle of works that explore the colonial and post-colonial exchange between Europe and the Americas.

This film explores Gillian Jagger's work, the relationship of that work to her life, and the role of art in society.

Feminist filmmaker Victoria Schultz captures the memory of her own past, trying to become a writer while becoming entangled in erotic and frightening encounters with an older man. A #MeToo film that stretches back to one woman's memory growing up in the 1950s.