The question is not whether women can direct films. Women have been directing films since Alice Guy-Blaché made The Cabbage Fairy in 1896 — one of the earliest narrative films ever produced. The question is: what difference does female direction make? What does a film look like when made by someone who has been, for most of cinema’s history, the object of the gaze rather than its author?
The answer is in the films. Here are 20 of them, with genuine arguments for why they matter.
The Canonical Reframings
1. Agnès Varda — Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
Varda’s film follows a singer for two hours of real time as she waits for medical results that may confirm cancer. It is the purest sustained exploration of what it feels like to be a beautiful woman existing in a city — the feeling of being looked at, the gap between the self experienced from inside and the self performed for others. Male directors had made films about women. Varda made a film from inside female consciousness. The difference is total.
2. Agnès Varda — Vagabond (1985)
A young woman found frozen in a ditch. The film unspools backwards, through testimony from those who knew her, asking what it means to choose radical freedom when radical freedom for women ends like this. One of the most politically serious films about female bodily autonomy ever made.
3. Jane Campion — The Piano (1993)
The only film directed by a woman to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes until Julia Ducournau in 2021. Ada, a mute Scottish woman sold into marriage in colonial New Zealand, expresses herself through piano — and through desire, which the film treats with a directness that shocked critics raised on male cinema’s pornographic or romantic versions of female sexuality. Campion makes desire complex, dangerous, and entirely Ada’s own.
4. Kathryn Bigelow — The Hurt Locker (2009)
The argument for Bigelow on this list is not that The Hurt Locker is about women — it isn’t. It’s about the argument it demolishes: that female directors make films about domestic life and feelings, while male directors make films about action and consequence. The Hurt Locker is the most visceral and serious film made about the Iraq War. Bigelow winning the Academy Award for Best Director — the first woman ever to do so — broke a ceiling while simultaneously proving that the ceiling had nothing to do with the competence beneath it.
5. Sofia Coppola — Lost in Translation (2003)
Tokyo, insomnia, two Americans adrift. The film is almost plotless and completely precise. Its portrait of female loneliness — not dramatic loneliness, but the ambient loneliness of a life that doesn’t quite fit — is unlike anything male directors were making at the time. The restraint is the content.
The Visionaries
6. Maya Deren — Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Deren’s surrealist short is one of the founding texts of American experimental cinema. Made with her husband Alexander Hammid, but the vision is entirely hers: a woman trapped in a loop, pursued by a robed figure with a mirror for a face, in a domestic space that has become genuinely threatening. Made 80 years ago and still more disturbing than most contemporary horror.
7. Chantal Akerman — Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
The Sight & Sound poll of 2022 named this the greatest film ever made — the first film by a woman to receive the distinction. It is three and a half hours of a Brussels housewife performing domestic tasks with meticulous precision. The film is radical because it refuses to editorialize: it simply watches, with the same attention given to peeling potatoes as to anything a male director would consider worthy of the camera’s eye. Then it breaks. Akerman makes domestic life — its rhythms, its containments, its violences — the subject of serious cinema in a way that had never been done before.
8. Larisa Shepitko — The Ascent (1977)
The greatest film to come from the Soviet Union that most Western viewers have never seen. A WWII partisan story that becomes a religious meditation on sacrifice and betrayal. Shepitko died in a car accident in 1979 at age 41. The Ascent is what she left: a film of terrifying moral clarity made with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what she was doing.
9. Věra Chytilová — Daisies (1966)
Two women decide, since the world is already corrupt, to be as corrupt as possible. A Czech New Wave masterpiece that is also a sustained feminist provocation: the anarchic energy, the colour, the destruction of the final sequence. Banned by the Czechoslovak government for “depicting the wanton.” The wantonness is the point.
10. Claire Denis — Beau Travail (1999)
Denis’s film about French Foreign Legion soldiers in Djibouti is an act of radical attention paid to the male body — the inverse of how the female body has been gazed at by cinema for a century. It is also a film about colonial possession, about desire, about ritual and violence. The final disco sequence is one of the great endings in cinema.
The Contemporary Masters
11. Mati Diop — Atlantics (2019)
The first film by a Black woman to compete for the Palme d’Or. Dakar, a woman waiting for her lover who has left on a boat to Europe, a story that becomes a ghost story that becomes a feminist meditation on who gets to move and who gets left behind. Diop made a film that could only have been made by someone who understood, from the inside, the experience of being at both sides of that border.
12. Chloé Zhao — Nomadland (2021)
Frances McDormand as a woman who has lost everything and chooses to live in a van rather than reassemble the conventional life she’s lost. Zhao shot in real locations with real nomads. The film is a meditation on American freedom — who has access to it, what it costs, what it gives — that is also the most honest film about ageing and loss made in American cinema in recent memory.
13. Greta Gerwig — Lady Bird (2017)
A coming-of-age film that manages to be the most accurate account of the experience of being a teenage girl with ambition in a medium where teenage girls with ambition have mostly been background characters. Gerwig’s Sacramento is hyper-specific and completely universal.
14. Celine Song — Past Lives (2023)
Song’s debut feature is 24 years and three acts of a love story that asks what might have been — not with sentimentality but with unflinching intelligence about the choices that make a self. The final scene belongs to the woman, which is not a small thing.
15. Julia Ducournau — Titane (2021)
The second Palme d’Or winner directed by a woman. Body horror, gender identity, the violence of femininity and its collapse. Not easy, not comfortable, and entirely necessary. Ducournau made a film about bodies — what we do to them, what they do to us — that has no equivalent in male-directed cinema because male-directed cinema has never had the same relationship to the experience of living in a female body.
The Documentarians
16. Barbara Kopple — Harlan County, USA (1976)
An Academy Award-winning documentary about a coal miner’s strike in Kentucky in which the women of the mining community become the film’s moral centre. Kopple filmed in conditions of genuine danger. The result is one of the greatest American documentaries.
17. Marwencol — Jennifer Lynch and Jeff Malmberg (2010)
Not directed by a woman, but the story of a woman’s vision. A man builds a miniature WWII town and populates it entirely with female warriors. But Lynch’s Boxing Helena (1993) belongs on any list of female direction — flawed, strange, and far more interesting than its dismissal by critics who were very comfortable dismissing Lynch’s daughter.
18. Agnes Varda — The Gleaners and I (2000)
Varda wanders France with a digital camera, filming people who glean — who pick up what’s left behind by others. A meditation on waste, on accumulation, on what we throw away and who picks it up. Made when Varda was 71. The most joyful film about ageing ever made.
The Essentials You Need to See Now
19. Alice Rohrwacher — Happy as Lazzaro (2018)
An Italian peasant community existing in feudal conditions in the late 20th century. Then the community is “freed” and the film becomes something stranger and more unsettling. Rohrwacher is the most significant Italian director of her generation. She is little known outside film festival circuits. This should not be allowed to continue.
20. Céline Sciamma — Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
An 18th-century painter commissioned to secretly paint a woman destined for an arranged marriage. The relationship that develops is the purest cinema has ever come to depicting female desire on its own terms — not as spectacle, not as tragedy, but as fact. The final shot, five minutes of Adèle Haenel watching, is one of the most powerful endings in recent cinema.
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