52 Films By Women Volume 9 – Some Reflections
Pictured: Agnes Shakespeare (Jessie Buckley, centre) is expectant at a production of her husband's play, 'Hamlet' in a scene from the film, 'Hamnet', directed by Asian-American auteur, Chloë Zhao. Still courtesy of Focus Features.
Between Friday 21 February 2025 and Sunday 8 February 2026,
I have watched and reflected on a further fifty-two feature films directed by women.
The challenge just to watch the films – not to review them – was set by Melissa
Silverstein, founder and publisher of ‘Women in Hollywood’, in 2015. I
consciously select feature films and not documentaries and only those intended
for cinema, that is, commercial release. My rationale is these films are made
to compete in a global marketplace. By demonstrating their artistic worth and
commercial appeal, these films advocate for more films from women directors to
be greenlit, addressing prejudice.
Many of these films I watch at festivals. In the case of
this volume, at Berlin, Brussels, Cambridge, London and Rotterdam. Visiting the
United States, where human rights abuses are committed daily, is not an option.
I have travelled to Paris and Den Haag to watch films. This activity is partly
a hobby but also a means to be continually stimulated by cinema. To select a
film based only on a director’s gender and to consider the impact that gender
has on a specific film is an adventure of sorts. This endeavour has led to
pleasant discoveries – Bob Trevino Likes It stands out – as well
as exposure to striking movies, such as If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,
Sorry Baby, Sorda, Weightless, Silent Friend, The Mastermind, Die
My Love, 28 Years Later – The Bone Temple, The
Voice of Hind Rajab, H is for Hawk and Los Domingos.
Not every film directed by a woman achieves its aims, but my
experience as a weekly film reviewer in the 1990s showed me that male
filmmakers are more likely to be guilty of lazy plotting and insulting the
audience than female ones. Female film directors don’t always work with the
most popular stars, for example Tom Cruise, or get the largest budgets. However,
there remain outliers like Greta Gerwig, currently completing an adaptation of
C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew for Netflix.
The directors whose work I have watched come from 19
different countries. The genres of their films include comedy, drama, musical
and horror. No crime thrillers, gangster films or westerns. 21 out of 52 films
are debut feature films, which suggests that it is easier for a woman to get
their first film made than their second or third. 11 of the films are
adaptations of previously published material (e.g., Hamnet, The
Salt Path). Five of the 52 films are sequels. One of the 52 (Beautiful)
is a remake. It is more common for women with original material,
usually self-generated as a writer-director.
In terms of themes, mental health, parent-child
relationships, body image, abuse, ill health, friendship and romance feature
repeatedly, sometimes in the same movie. Extremely few of the films are
sexually explicit. In Sorry Baby, Eva Victor depicts ‘before’ and
‘after’ with a single cut of the front of a house indicating the passage from day
to night. There are no biopics in the list. The narratives skew towards the
positive, overcoming adversity, rather than the tragic.
According to data published on Box Office Mojo as of 14
February 2026, six of the 52 films record no gross, partly due to not yet being
commercially released (Blue Heron, Sink, The
Fence, Silent Friend, Short Summer), partly
owing to the box office not being declared (Messy). A few of the
films appear to have their earnings under-reported (the Canadian film, Can
I Get A Witness, the British film, Lollipop). The six
most commercially successful films are the sequels Five Nights at
Freddy’s 2, Freakier Friday, I Know What You Did Last Summer and 28
Years Later – The Bone Temple as well as Materialists (a
romantic comedy-drama outlier) and Hamnet.
Few of the films have generated controversy. A notable
exception is The Salt Path, based on a previously published
memoir and embraced as a true story but subsequentially exposed as fabricated.
The film, which performed well in UK and the Netherlands, proved that a woman,
in this case author Raynor Winn, could be as guilty of deception as any man.
A sizeable number of films were made by women with a strong
sense of visual or storytelling style. The auteurs in question are Kaouther Ben
Hania, Emilie Blichfeldt, Mary Bronstein, Carolina Cavalli, Gurinder Chadha, Claire
Denis, Julia Ducournau, Ildiko Enyedi, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Annemarie Jacir, Sophie
Letourneur, Eva Libertad, Lynne Ramsay, Kelly Reichardt, Mascha Schilinski,
Celine Song, Kristen Stewart, Amalia Ulman, Eva Victor, Laura Wandel and Chloë
Zhao. These are directors worth following for whatever they do next.
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