Essential Films by Female Directors

1975 film by Chantal Akerman

Two teenage girls embark on a series of destructive pranks in which they consume and destroy the world around them.

The notorious pirate ruler Madame X places a print ad, calling on women to escape their boring lives and promising "gold, love and adventure" to all who come aboard her ship, the Orlando. A motley crew including a housewife, diva and artist (played by Yvonne Rainer) embark on a quest for self-transformation, which quickly heads towards destruction as they are subjected to Madame X's sadistic, erotic escapades.

1985 film directed by Agnès Varda

As an awkward idealistic high school teacher begins her first job in the city, things turn out to be much tougher than she had imagined.

1977 film by Larisa Shepitko

Some European traveled from Europe to Mongolia by train to experience the life in Mongolia…

The films of Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942) are shaped by a fascination with place, a topical and topographical curiosity that drives their wanderlust across locales both imagined and real, from the fantastically spectral Berlin of the early Freak Orlando and the nostalgia shrouded Viennese amusement park of Prater, to the vast, remote steppes of Central Asia explored in Taiga and the busy banquet halls of present-day Seoul in The Korean Wedding Chest. Ottinger’s fiction films kaleidoscope a carnivalesque vision of the world, staging unpredictable encounters with a remarkably motley cast of “freak” outsiders – lovers, pirates, brigands, grafters and their adversaries. While Ottinger’s documentaries, in contrast, focus insightfully on the quotidian reality of everyday people, but are no less colorful and exuberant in their spirited exploration of the playful and poetic intersection of the traditional and contemporary.
Born in Konstanz, Germany, Ottinger spent much of the 1960s working as a painter in Paris – where she also studied with the likes of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser – before launching her film career in Berlin in the early 1970s. Ottinger’s earliest films grow out of her close association with various Berlin subcultures and art scenes and involved collaborations with such luminary figures as Tabea Blumenschein, as well as Irm Hermann, Kurt Raab and Magdalena Montezuma, actors central to the Fassbinder scene. International recognition and reknown followed her first feature film Madame X (1977), which especially drew the interest of queer and feminist critics and scholars in the U.S. To this day Ottinger’s films are held up for their radicalness, not only of narrative but also of their treatment of sexuality and of gender itself. A Renaissance woman, Ottinger writes her own scripts, frequently operates the camera and even designs the often elaborate sets and costumes showcased in her films.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and a massive funding crisis for “art cinema” coincided at the beginning of the 1990s to inspire a distinct shift in Ottinger’s cinema away from the theatrical extravagances of her early film work to a mode of carefully observed documentary. Yet uniting and cross-pollinating Ottinger’s documentary and fiction work are a set of running themes – a concern for the normative function of power and its ability to repress and ostracize difference; a nostalgia for the cosmopolitism of pre-war Central Europe; and a delight in the richness and beauty of “other cultures,” be they popular, archaic or simply non-Western.
Taiga
Directed by Ulrike Ottinger.
Germany 1992, 16mm, color, 501 min. Mongolian and Tuvinian with English subtitles
Ottinger returned to Mongolia to craft her incredible epic documentary portrait of reindeer herders on the far Northern steppes. While offering rare glimpses into the shamanic ceremonies, hunts, weddings and amusements that color the herders’ lives, Taiga uses its nine hours to resist any notion of the nomads as simply “exotic” by creating a fully immersive encounter with the Mongolians daily routines and rituals. Bearing mesmerizing witness to a world seemingly out of time, Taiga is ultimately a study in contrasts: between the vast steppes and the intimacy of the nomads’ private spaces, between the mobility of the nomadic life and the fixity of Ottinger’s camera, between pre-modern practices and their contemporary variations.

Based on the novel of the same name by Oleksandr Dovzhenko. About the childhood of the famous Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was born on the ancient lands of Chernihiv, along the banks the Desna. The film consists of two parts. The first is the world shown through the impressions of the six-year-old Sashko. The second is the recollections and reasoning of Sashko, now an elderly colonel who liberates his native village during the war.

1980 film by Helma Sanders-Brahms

1962 film by Agnès Varda

An experimental retelling of the story of Adam and Eve which then progresses into an allegorical depiction of the loss of innocence.

After twelve years of imprisonment by their own parents, two Iranian sisters are finally released by social workers to face the outside world for the first time.

2016 film by Maren Ade

A therapist looks into the mind of a woman diagnosed as schizophrenic and finds, not madness, but tortured sexual guilt created by the taboos of society.

This experimental documentary is a compendium of striking images of Eastern Europe and its citizens in transition, following the collapse of the so-called Cold War. Places as diverse as Baltic beaches, and Moscow's snow-covered streets vie for attention along with the citizens of these places as they wait in lines, march in military formation, or stand idle in the waiting rooms of train stations. There is no narration, and no clear point (except the idea of transitions) is indicated by the beautifully chosen, enigmatic imagery. Indeed, there is not even much musical accompaniment. Fans of director Chantal Akerman's aggressively "non-commercial" work are likelier to find this film more appealing than the average viewer will.

On a trip across Western Europe to promote her newest release, filmmaker Anna encounters several individuals—familiar and otherwise—and attends to their discontents.

Michail helps out Nicolai and Lubia giving them a ride to a nearby construction site. They will work there to build a new town and factory.

An old man is wandering round a badly signposted and as yet mostly under construction Prague housing estate looking for the high rise block into which he is supposed to be moving with his daughter's family. The old granddad from the countryside likes chatting, nothing escapes his eyes and he wants to give everyone a helping hand.