Women's Voices

Martha Coolidge was raped when she was sixteen, and years later she had actors re-enact that evening for the camera while she stood in the shot with them, stopping scene after scene. The young woman who plays her had been through something similar, and Coolidge didn’t have to look far to find her. — In 1962, Curly heads to a party in New York with a group of friends, sixteen-year-old Martha among them. In a borrowed flat he leads her into the next room and won’t leave her alone. Twelve years later two actors play out that night in a New York loft dressed to look like the period, and between takes they sit down and argue over what the girl in the scene could have done and what she couldn’t.

Janusz Gajos and Maja Ostaszewska star in the film that won Małgorzata Szumowska a Silver Bear at Berlin. A prosecutor’s daughter is placed in the care of a therapist who is convinced she can get through to the other side, and death and comedy end up sharing almost every scene. — A prosecutor spends his days among corpses at crime scenes and can still sit down to his evening soup without batting an eyelid. His teenage daughter Olga, meanwhile, is starving herself to death, so he checks her into a clinic, where Anna takes over her care. Calm and level-headed, the therapist is also convinced that it’s possible to talk to the dead, and she’d like to give it a go. — Best Director | Berlin International Film Festival | 2015 People's Choice Award | European Film Awards | 2016 Best European Editor | European Film Awards | 2015 Best Film | Eagles - Polish Film Awards | 2016 Golden Lions | Polish Film Festival | 2015 Best Feature Film | Polish Film Festival | 2015 Best Actor (Janusz Gajos) | Polish Film Festival | 2015 Best Sound | Polish Film Festival | 2015

Based on a Norwegian comic by Inga Sætre, this surprising comedy about an unwanted pregnancy never moralises. Sætre also drew the animated sequences in which the unborn baby talks to Rakel, and it has plenty of opinions about her plans and her friends. — Rakel wants to be an astronaut, a forest ranger or a cartoonist, anything but a mother. She draws, parties and brings home whoever she likes, until one day she finds out she’s pregnant, and has been for a long time without noticing a thing. Rakel doesn’t want a baby, but it has already made itself at home in her belly. — Best Feature Film - Generation 14plus | Berlin International Film Festival | 2021 Best European Comedy | European Film Awards | 2021 Audience Award | SXSW Film Festival | 2021

Teenage Alec shoots and edits porn for his father’s company, and everything he knows about intimacy he has learned through a lens. Then he’s handed a school project on, of all things, porn addiction, and the film takes him on with tenderness and nerve. — In a small town on the English coast, teenage Alec helps out in his father’s line of work, which happens to be porn. He operates the camera on set and edits the footage afterwards, yet when it comes to real sex he has very little experience. That’s when Nina from his class dares him to try it for real. — Nominated for Best First Feature | Berlin International Film Festival | 2026

When Jane Birkin, the famous model and actress, confided to Agnès Varda (“Cléo from 5 to 7”) that turning forty terrified her, Varda answered with a film. The playful portrait that came out of it captures a bond between an actress and a director quite unlike any other. — Jane Birkin sits down in front of the camera without make-up and asks to be filmed as if she were as transparent and anonymous as anyone else, which is the one thing this kaleidoscopic study won’t do. Instead it drops her into a Renaissance portrait, a thriller and a black-and-white comedy, and straps her into Joan of Arc’s armour. Woman, mother, muse, idol: every one of them goes by her name.

This subtle Moroccan romance treats its fabrics with as much love as its people, and it won the FIPRESCI Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. When a young apprentice joins Halim, who embroiders caftans by hand, nobody says out loud what is happening, but everyone knows. — Halim embroiders traditional caftans by hand in a small tailor’s shop in the old medina, keeping alive a craft that machines are steadily pushing out. His wife Mina is seriously ill, and their marriage rests on tenderness and on everything they leave unsaid. Then a young apprentice walks into the workshop. — FIPRESCI Prize - Un Certain Regard | Cannes Film Festival | 2022 Audience Award | Athens International Film Festival | 2022 Best Director | Chicago International Film Festival | 2022

Gabriela Muskała wrote the script and plays the woman at its heart, back with her family after two years away, while Agnieszka Smoczyńska (“The Lure”) directs. The title refers to dissociative fugue, a state in which the mind protects itself from something it can’t bear by escaping it altogether. — A woman who vanished two years ago is found at a Warsaw railway station, filthy, unable to remember anything and calling herself Alicja. A man who says he is her husband recognises her on a TV programme about missing people and drives her to Lower Silesia, where there is a little boy. But is she really Kinga? — Discovery of Year Award | Eagles - Polish Film Awards | 2019 Best Debut Director | Polish Film Festival | 2018 Best Cinematography | Polish Film Festival | 2018 Nominated for Critics' Week Grand Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2018

This is the role that made the world notice Jennifer Lawrence, in a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner with four Oscar nominations. A seventeen-year-old searches the Ozark Mountains for a father nobody will talk about, and the world is cruel, but she proves stronger and tougher than anyone expects. — Seventeen-year-old Ree is bringing up her younger brother and sister on her own through a Missouri winter in the Ozarks. Their father has put the house on the line and vanished, and if he doesn’t turn up in court, they’ll lose their home. The people of the valley would rather she didn’t ask where he is, and Ree asks anyway. — Grand Jury Prize | Sundance Film Festival | 2010 Nomination for Best Picture | Oscars | 2011 Nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Jennifer Lawrence) | Oscars | 2011 Nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 2011 Nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (John Hawkes) | Oscars | 2011 Nomination for Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence) | Golden Globes | 2011

Agnieszka Holland’s much-discussed film struck a political nerve with its Syrian families in the forest and swamps between Belarus and Poland, pushed west by one side and back east by the other. Stuhr, Ostaszewska and Kulesza head a cast of Polish stars, and it won the Special Jury Prize at Venice. — A Syrian family walks into the forest and swamps on the border between Belarus and Poland, believing it will be easy to get into Europe. Instead, Belarusian guards push them west, Polish guards send them back east, and it starts all over again. Jan is one of the border guards, while Julia has left a comfortable life behind to bring help into the forest. — Special Jury Prize | Venice Film Festival | 2023 Arca Cinema Giovani Award Best Film | Venice Film Festival | 2023 Premio CinemaSarà Award | Venice Film Festival | 2023 Green Drop Award | Venice Film Festival | 2023 Audience Award - Best International Feature | Chicago International Film Festival | 2023 Best Film | Polish Film Festival | 2024 Audience Award | Rotterdam Film Festival | 2024

Julia Ducournau, who won the Palme d’Or for “Titane”, returns with another shattering body horror about a mysterious virus that turns the infected to stone. Golshifteh Farahani plays a doctor and mother who watches the disease consume her brother while she fears for her own daughter. — Thirteen-year-old Alpha comes home from a party with a crooked letter A tattooed on her arm with a dirty needle. Her mother, a doctor, knows exactly what is spreading through the city: a disease that slowly turns the infected to marble. Then her uncle, Amin, moves in, trying to come off heroin, and at school the rumours have already started that Alpha is infected. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2025

Monika Majorek’s debut brings a group of siblings back to the family home, where their father now lives on only in old videotapes, and it’s as moving as it is hopeful. The cast includes Agata Kulesza and Maja Pankiewicz, who deserves every award going for one scene alone. — After their father dies, the family home has to be emptied, and the grown-up siblings gather to pack it up. Sorting through everything, Ola finds a pile of old videotapes and sits down in front of the TV with her brother Pipek and the youngest, Ajka. Together they decide to recreate their childhood photos in the same rooms and in the same poses.

Skate Kitchen is a New York crew of girl skateboarders, and here its members play fictional versions of themselves. It all began when the director met two of them on the subway, and the film feels like an afternoon with girls who laugh at anyone who says their place is in the kitchen. — After an accident, Camille’s mother bans her from skating, so the eighteen-year-old from Long Island keeps doing it behind her back. When she finds Skate Kitchen, a crew of New York girls, online, she gets on a train to meet them, and they take her in straight away. She tells her mother she’s at the library, until one evening she misses the last train home.

Marjane Satrapi first told this story as a comic book, then brought it to the screen herself, with Catherine Deneuve voicing the mother and Chiara Mastroianni the daughter. It’s about growing up in Tehran while a revolution decides what women may do, and the animation hasn’t aged a day. — Nine-year-old Marjane, growing up in Tehran in 1978, has decided she’s going to be a prophet. Politics is what her family talks about over dinner, and the Shah is about to fall. Soon the revolution is deciding what a girl can wear, read and say out loud, until at fourteen her parents send her to Vienna on her own. — Nomination for Best Animated Feature | Oscars | 2008 Jury Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2007 Best Adapted Screenplay | César Awards | 2008 Best First Film | César Awards | 2008 Audience Award | Rotterdam Film Festival | 2008

Claire Denis was forty-two when she made her debut, and she set it in the colonial Africa where she grew up as a civil servant’s daughter, with the last days of colonialism coming apart in memory. You can feel the heat in every frame. — It’s 1957 in Mindif, northern Cameroon. Little France, whose father is a French colonial administrator, spends her days with Protée, the family’s servant. Years later she returns to the house as a grown woman, and with her comes back everything that once lay between them. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1988

Nine-year-old Benni bites and kicks anyone who touches her, and the system no longer knows what to do with her. Nora Fingscheidt spent five years visiting children’s homes before writing the film, which took a Silver Bear in Berlin, and as Benni the young Helena Zengel is electrifying. — Benni is nine and lashes out at anyone who touches her. Every foster family, school and care home in the area has taken her in and sent her away, and her mother, who wants her back, is as frightened of her as all the other adults are. Then social services assign her a trainer whose job is teaching people to deal with aggression. — Alfred Bauer Prize | Berlin International Film Festival | 2019 Best European Composer | European Film Awards | 2019

Virginie Efira plays a woman in love, from the dance where she meets her daughter’s father to the ruins of what they had forty years later. The story comes from Christine Angot’s novel about her own parents, and the little girl watching them from the next room is the one who will one day write it. — Rachel is a young office worker in late-1950s provincial France when she meets Philippe, a young man from a wealthy family with an artist’s soul, and they fall for each other at once. He won’t marry her, but he won’t disappear either. For the next four decades he stays in her life and in the life of their daughter, Chantal.

Fresh off the triumph of Anora, Sean Baker returns to the streets of Taipei as producer, screenwriter, and editor, reunited with his longtime collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou. A vibrant and intimate take on family bonds, powered by one of the finest child performances in recent cinema. — When a mother and her two daughters move in together in Taipei, they struggle to adjust to the rhythms of urban life while trying to preserve their fragile family unity. At the same time, the younger daughter discovers that her left hand is considered “evil.” — Official Selection - Critics' Week | Cannes Film Festival | 2025

A husband like the one Vincent Cassel plays is impossible to live with, and almost as hard to leave. Emmanuelle Bercot won Best Actress at Cannes as his wife, and Maïwenn shows what it does to you to love the life and soul of the party, a man who draws you in and tears you down. — After a skiing accident, Tony faces long weeks in a rehabilitation centre, and for once she has time to think about her marriage. She and Georgio met in a nightclub, and from then on everything happened very fast: the flat, the wedding, the son. Only Agnès, Georgio’s ex, never quite left the picture. — Best Actress (Emmanuelle Bercot) | Cannes Film Festival | 2015 Nominated for Best Film | César Awards | 2016 Nominated for Best Director | César Awards | 2016 Nominated for Best Actor (Vincent Cassel) | César Awards | 2016 Nominated for Best Actress (Emmanuelle Bercot) | César Awards | 2016 Nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Louis Garrel) | César Awards | 2016 Nominated for Best Sound | César Awards | 2016 Nominated for Best Editing | César Awards | 2016 Nominated for Best Original Music | César Awards | 2016

Seven years before “The Substance”, Coralie Fargeat made this feminist revenge film steeped in exploitation style, in which a woman left to die in the desert goes hunting for the men who put her there. It’s all sand, scorching sun and furious pink, and its rage is explosive and exhilarating. — A helicopter drops Jen and her married lover, Richard, at a house in the middle of the Moroccan desert. They were meant to be alone, but two of Richard’s friends, Stan and Dimitri, turn up unexpectedly and the drinking goes on until dawn. The next morning Stan rapes Jen, and when she runs, Richard catches her and pushes her off the edge of a cliff. Jen has no intention of being just a victim.

One of only two documentaries ever to win the Golden Lion at Venice follows photographer and activist Nan Goldin, who, after her own experience with the opioid OxyContin, took aim at the family that sells it. The Sacklers, she discovered, fund the museums where her work hangs. — In late-1970s New York, Nan Goldin photographs the people around her, and over the next decade most of them die of AIDS. Years later, once she has beaten an addiction to the OxyContin she was prescribed, she sets out to find who makes it. The trail leads straight to the museums that hang her work. — Golden Lion | Venice Film Festival | 2022 Nominated for Best Documentary | Oscars | 2023 Nominated for Best Documentary | BAFTA | 2023

Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) opens a door onto what it means to be a teenage girl, with four leads she found on the streets of Paris, none of whom had acted before. When they sing every word of Rihanna’s “Diamonds” in a hotel room, life can wait until the song is over. — Sixteen-year-old Marieme looks after her little sister on a housing estate outside Paris, and she has just been told she’s going to vocational school instead of high school. Her older brother rules at home, because their mother works from morning till night. When three girls from the estate ask her to come into the city with them, she says no, then changes her mind. — Nominated for Most Promising Actress (Karidja Touré) | César Awards | 2015 Nominated for Best Director | César Awards | 2015

Audrey Diwan won the Golden Lion in Venice for this adaptation of Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux’s book about a student who gets pregnant and wants an abortion in 1960s France, where that could land her in prison. It still feels far too current. — In Angoulême in 1963, Anne is the best student in her year and the first in her family to get this far. When she finds out she’s pregnant, doctors refuse to help because abortion is a crime, and her friends can do nothing as the weeks slip by. So Anne starts selling her belongings to pay someone willing to end the pregnancy. — Golden Lion | Venice Film Festival | 2021 FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 2021 Most Promising Actress (Anamaria Vartolomei) | César Awards | 2022 Nominated for Best Film | César Awards | 2022 Nominated for Best Director | César Awards | 2022 Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay | César Awards | 2022

No wonder an eight-year-old can’t understand why her mother has to go into space. Eva Green plays a woman who is both an astronaut and a mother, which makes her crew doubt her, and Alice Winocour films not space but the last weeks before launch. Reaching for the stars costs her dearly. — Every morning eight-year-old Stella is walked to school by her mother, a French astronaut who has just won a place on the crew of the Proxima mission. Ahead lie a year of training, longer and longer trips away and less and less time at home. Stella’s parents are separated, so for that year she will be living with her father alone, and she is already counting the days. — Platform Prize - Honourable Mention | Toronto International Film Festival | 2019 Special Prize of the Jury | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 2019

Ingmar Bergman wrote and shot many of his films on Fårö, and that’s where Mia Hansen-Løve brings Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth, while Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie star in a film that’s still taking shape in someone’s head. Slowly, one story starts to seep into the other. — Chris and Tony, a married couple who both make films, rent a house for the summer on Fårö, the island where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked. Tony writes with ease and finds an audience already waiting for him, while Chris can’t even get her screenplay started. So she slips out of a screening and goes exploring the island with a young Swedish film student. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2021