Directed by Women

An official selection of the Sundance Film Festival, Milisuthando is a poetic, memory-driven exploration of love, intimacy, race, and belonging from a woman who grew up during apartheid but didn't know it was happening until it was over.

A vérité style documentary about two women trying to make it as stand-up comics in New York City. Filmmaker Katherine Matheson followed comics Cheryl Klein and Zora Rasmussen over a four year period as they hustled through clubs, improv spots and late night interviews. Newly restored in 2025.

A maverick in New York City’s downtown dance scene, choreographer Jane Comfort has been recognized for issue-oriented works integrating text and movement since the late 1970s. Through Comfort’s metamorphosis from a polite Southern transplant into a prolific performer celebrated worldwide for bold political satire and irreverent social commentary, the film invites viewers to be inspired by an artist who defies expectations.

An actress and new mother is haunted by voices as she embarks on inhabiting the role of surrealist writer Suzanne Roussi-Césaire. In the sleepy palm groves of the tropics, a small group of filmmakers and actors confront the history of writer Suzanne Césaire in her youth and then stage scenes from her life, troubling the “paradise” of historical memory. Moving between narrative filmmaking and abstraction, this is a film that leaves room for the unknown. 

Freely inspired by the story of Oedipus, Angela Schanelec's latest is as terrifying as myth and as gentle as a folk song. An official selection of the New York Film Festival.

Bella, is about the life, influence and impact of California-based artist and activist Bella Lewitzky. Designated one of America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures by the Dance Heritage Coalition Lewitzky’s life demonstrates how a “uniquely Californian” artist with vision and tenacity can change the lives of her fellow citizens.

Last Things looks at evolution and extinction from the perspective of the rocks and minerals that came before humanity and will outlast us. With scientists and thinkers like Lynn Margulis and  Marcia Bjørnerud as guides, the film seeks a picture of evolution without humans at the center.

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.