Films Directed by Women

Senegalese pop sensation Youssou Ndour has spent the last 20 years in the spotlight as a world-renowned musician and the iconic representative "voice of Africa." At the height of his career, Youssou became frustrated by the negative perception of his Muslim faith and composed Egypt, a deeply spiritual album dedicated to a more tolerant view of Islam. The album's brave musical message was wholeheartedly embraced by Western audiences but ignited serious religious controversy in his homeland of Senegal. The film chronicles the difficult journey Youssou must undertake to assume his true calling.

In Mauritania, a country seemingly bound by tradition and male dominance, three women speak freely about sex, love and money.

2003 film

As a novelist, actress/screenwriter for François Ozon and director, Marina de Van is fearless, always eager to deal with taboos and expose herself. Mostly home-made and shot under the radar, Ma nudité ne sert à rien is a brave self-portrait of de Van as a forty-something wandering soul, asking herself about her work, body and relationships in the age of dating apps and one-night stands.

Investigating the gruesome murder of a cabinet minister's daughter, a special investigator and a local police detective find themselves knee-deep in political corruption and conspiracy, in this sizzling noir thriller set in post-apartheid South Africa.

A playwright Iran tries to confront a creative crisis while political clashes erupt during her country's 2009 election.

2007 film by Hana Makhmalbaf

Documentary showing the backstage of production of Samira Makhmalbaf's film Panj É Asr(At Five in the Afternoon), in Kabul, after the fall of the Taliban regime. Everything was recorded with a small digital camera by Samira's 14-year-old sister Hana.

Zephyr, a strong-willed adolescent girl, spends her summer vacation with her grandparents in the mountains, waiting for her mother to come and take her back home. Her mother finally shows up, but only to say farewell before going far away places for a voluntary position. But Zephyr is determined that she will not let her mother ever leave her again.

The Iranian revolution leads to the Shah’s downfall and installation of the Islamic Republic. Avoiding the more sensational elements of the news this film questions Iranian society as a whole to try to understand what this wave of change means for the Muslim world.

Three women meet by chance at the end of the world, in Argentinian Patagonia, and set out on a polyamorous journey, caught up in the search for new kinds of relationships, far from possession and pain. They become the Daughters of Fire, a band dedicated to helping those women who look for their own path to erotica.

In 1977, when she was four years old, Albertina Carri's parents vanished without a trace, victims of Argentina's brutal military junta. In this fresh and politically daring film, the young Argentinian filmmaker attempts to unravel the mystery, piecing together her memories and fantasies in a quest to understand her parents' untimely fate.

An incestuous love affair. Meme and Jeremias are the younger children in a typical bourgeois family. Their mother Lucia is the dominant force in the household, but her fixation on upholding the niceties of upper middle class life has prevented her from seeing what is going on under her roof. When the siblings’ older brother and his fiancee arrive home for their wedding, it seems inevitable that the concealment will be impossible to sustain. But equally it becomes apparent that if Lucia were to find out about the affair, there would be catastrophic consequences.

A married woman with a mute daughter has a forbidden relationship with the single father of a teenage boy.

A noir vision of a paranoid and dangerous Buenos Aires where a group of diverse Porteños are fatefully linked by a brutal killing.

Albertina Carri wants to make a film about Isidro Velázquez, an almost mythical outlaw figure from northern Argentina who was shot dead by police in 1967. She’s not the only one interested in him: her sociologist father Roberto Carri wrote a book on him called “Pre-Revolutionary Forms of Violence” and a film was made about his story, although both father and film disappeared during the Dirty War. Legends, families, political alignments, cinema: none offer a stable foothold and Carri’s passage through them is like wandering a garden of forking paths, only to arrive at a landscape of cracked earth and thorns.

1949 film directed by Matilde Landeta

In Mexico City, two sisters live radically different lives: Maria, who—along with her supportive group of fellow sex workers—must deal with unscrupulous, abusive clients and her exploitative pimp, Rudy, and Elena, a society woman trapped in a marriage of convenience, who falls prey to Rudy’s fortune-seeking seduction.

1949 film by Matilde Landeta

Director Eva Sørhaug (Cold Lunch) reveals the rage and violence lurking beneath seemingly tranquil domesticity in her bold and uncompromising sophomore feature.