7 Female Movie Directors You Must Meet

There is a very convenient narrative that some people push forward: that women got to cinema too late. That they came later, that they had to fight their way in, that cinema history was dominated by men almost by design.

It's a comfortable lie. Agnès Varda and Godard were making movies at the same time. Lizzie Borden made political sci-fi films in the 80s with a 40k budget while Hollywood spent fortunes on blockbusters. This erasure is not a natural development. We haven't forgotten because it was a long time ago. It was a choice. And this article isn't about representation. It's about quality, what most of us probably haven't seen when it comes to women in cinema, and what we've lost in the process.

This article doesn't contain any relevant spoilers, just a list of films that will change your life.

Agnès Varda: The Pioneer

Before we discuss Varda, we need to make something clear: she's not Nouvelle Vague's grandmother. She is, at the very least, its mother, and part of cinema academia seriously struggles to accept that. Her first long-feature film, La Pointe Courte, came out in 1954, two years before Godard and Truffaut made their first short films. She didn't follow a movement. She anticipated one.

What makes Varda's filmography nearly impeccable is that she refuses to focus on one single genre. She traveled through fiction, documentary, and autobiography but managed to still be cohesive in a way that very few filmmakers in any genre managed to do. Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) is an exercise on feminine anxiety and time that feels modern even now, sixty years later. Vagabond (1985) won the Golden Lion award in Venice with a protagonist that only a few filmmakers could create: a woman that doesn't want to be saved.

In her last years, already as an 80-year-old woman, Varda still had in her to innovate. Faces Places (2017), which she co-directed with the artist known as JR, is one of the most gentle and politically critical documentaries in the last decade. Varda died in 2019 and left us with a filmography that challenges any simple definition. Where to begin: Cléo from 5 to 7.

Lynne Ramsay: Filming Trauma Without Normalizing It

Lynne Ramsay is the type of filmmaker that Hollywood might try to swallow but always ends up spitting it back out. She was hired to direct Jane Got a Gun in 2013 and simply didn't show up on the very first day. No one knows exactly what happened. What we know is that the movie carried on without her, and no one remembers it. We also saw her career remain intact in the eyes of those who matter.

Ramsay's work isn't comfortable. Ratcatcher (1999), her debut film, is set in Glasgow during a binmen's strike and follows a boy who has a lot of guilt for his age. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), the movie adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel, is a study on mothers' guilt but doesn't offer absolution or judgment. Tilda Swinton carries the movie with a performance that should have given her an Oscar, but it didn't. You Were Never Really Here (2017) became Cannes' best script and is a thriller that uses violence as a consequence, not as a spectacle.

What connects all of her films is the way trauma gets to the body before it gets to exist out loud. Her characters don't explain what they're feeling, they just carry it with them. We, the viewers, leave her films feeling heavy, and it's up to us to redirect that weight onto something else. Where to begin: We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Lucrecia Martel: Highlighting What Isn't Seen

There is a group of filmmakers who often highlight what everyone is refusing to see. Lucrecia Martel is the most radical among them. Her films are built on layers of sound, out-of-frame elements, and suggestions. What is left out of the frame carries as much weight as what is in the frame. In The Headless Woman (2008), the protagonist possibly runs over someone and simply decides she doesn't want to know for certain if she did. The camera corroborates this decision and also doesn't show us. Nothing is confirmed, nothing is denied. We're stuck in the same moral ambiguity as the main character.

The Salta Trilogy, which includes La Ciénaga (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), established Martel as one of the most unique voices in Latin American cinema. Zama (2017), the movie adaptation of the 19th-century novel, took almost a decade to come out and became one of the boldest films in the last decade. It's about waiting, colonialism, and the downfall of a man who can't even recognize his own defeat.

Sound, in Martel's movies, is almost a full-bodied character. She develops the soundtrack before the images during her creative process, which explains why what we hear in her movies always seems to belong to another reality. Where to begin: The Headless Woman.

Céline Sciamma: Turning Desire Into Shape

Céline Sciamma's first films have their merit, but Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) is exactly what she is all about. And that is, according to her own words, making desire the main star. Not as a theme, but as a language. As a way to frame, edit, and curate her films.

This film is set in the 18th century and follows a painter who is hired to paint a young woman without her consent in secret. What develops between them is one of the most well-developed romances in the last few years. Each scene adds on desire with near-nuclear precision. Nothing about Sciamma's directing is an accident. Each choice is intentional, each silence is calculated, and the result is a movie that exists entirely in the space between two sets of eyes.

Her work trusts the viewer to be intelligent and never explains what is being felt on screen. You see and understand because the movie made that possible. Where to begin: Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Mati Diop: The One Who Does a Lot with Very Little

Mati Diop doesn't need flashy elements. Her directing is all about the small details: a slightly tilted frame, a silence that lasts one more second and becomes uncomfortable, a light that shouldn't be pretty but is. Atlantique (2019), her first feature film, won Cannes' Grand Prix award and is one of the most impressive debut films of the decade.

The film follows Ada, a young woman living in Dakar whose partner journeys across the Atlantic in search of a better life along with other workers. What initially seems like a drama/romance turns into something closer to ghostly realism, with people coming back from the dead to demand what they didn't have in life. Diop films modern Senegal without making it exotic or too innocent. The supernatural elements aren't explained because they don't have to be.

As an actress, Diop worked with Claire Denis, which explains, in part, why her debut work is so mature. She knows what the camera does to a face and uses that knowledge with pinpoint precision. Where to begin: Atlantique.

Lizzie Borden: The One No One Tells You About

Born in Flames (1983) had a budget of 40 thousand dollars, took five years to be filmed, and is one of the most necessary political movies ever made. Lizzie Borden imagined the U.S.A. two years after a revolution that changed the entire country and left women out of the equation. What follows is a sci-fi story that looks like a documentary, with real activists and professional actresses sharing the same space, questioning what the revolution changed exactly and for whom.

The movie was ignored at the time. It was only brought up in underground circuits and nearly disappeared. It gained traction in the last few years because it aged like wine, almost like Benjamin Button. The more time passes, the more modern it feels. The questions Borden brings up, like what is the difference between a revolution that is declared and a revolution that is lived, still don't have an answer even now.

Borden followed her career with Working Girls (1986), a movie about sex workers in New York that was filmed with the same approach as Born in Flames. It doesn't judge. Instead, it insists on humanity. Borden's filmography is small in number but large in meaning. Where to begin: Born in Flames.

Cheryl Dunye: Toying With Language, But Remaining Political

The Watermelon Woman (1996) is simultaneously a black movie, a queer movie, a joke on documentary language, a commentary on historical erasure, and one of the most watched movies in this article. Cheryl Dunye plays herself, working at a video rental store, as she finds a black actress cited only as "watermelon woman" in movies made in the 30s and decides to investigate her story. The trick is: the actress doesn't exist. Dunye created fake documents, pictures, and other details to tell a story that should have been real but isn't because these lives were never in any registry.

It's a political movie that doesn't weigh down on you. It laughs about itself, it seduces you. It is accessible, but not simple. Dunye's film works for those who know everything about cinema theory and for those who have never studied cinema, which is quite rare and rarely celebrated as a proper gift.

More recently, she has directed TV show episodes, which explains why her name became a reference in the market but isn't on viewers' minds. Where to begin: The Watermelon Woman.

These seven directors are real, they made real films and worked hard, but academia ignored them. Some were recognized too late. Some are still waiting. What they all have in common is not their gender, aesthetics, or where they come from. They all refuse to make movies like it's just another job. Each movie in this list was made by someone who had something to say and found the best way to say it.

The question is not why they're good. It's why we all don't know them yet.

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Thank you for reading, and see you next time!