| Film: | Awards: |
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I Will Follow Director? Yes Writer? Yes Producer? Yes |
2011, African-American Film Critics, Won Best Screenplay |
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Middle of Nowhere Director? Yes Writer? Yes Producer? Yes |
2012, Sundance Film Festival, Won Directing Award 2012, Film Independent Spirit Awards, Won Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award 2012, African-American Film Critics, Won Best Independent Film & Best Screenplay 2012, Women Film Critics Circle, Won Josephine Baker Award 2013, Black Reel Awards, Won Best Director & Best Screenplay |
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Selma Director? Yes Writer? No Producer? No |
2014, Black Film Critics Circle, Won Best Director 2014, Central Ohio Film Critics Association, Won Best Director & Breakthrough Film Artist 2014, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, Won Best Woman Director & Female Icon of the Year 2014, African-American Film Critics Association, Won Best Director 2014, Black Reel Awards, Won Black Reel Award for Best Director |
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13th Director? Yes Writer? Yes Producer? Yes |
2016, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, Won Best Woman Actor & Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Film Industry 2016, Black Reel Awards, Won Best Feature Documentary 2016, Critics' Choice Documentary Awards, Won Best Director (TV/Streaming) 2016, Women Film Critics Circle, Best Woman Storyteller (Screenwriting Award) & Courage in Filmmaking 2017, Primetime Emmy Award, Won Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special & Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming |
| Films: | Awards: |
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Songs My Brothers Taught Me Director? Yes Writer? Yes Producer? Yes Editor? Yes |
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The Rider Director? Yes Writer? Yes Producer? Yes |
2017, Independent Spirit Awards, Won The Bonnie Award 2018, Gotham Independent Film Awards, Won Best Feature
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Nomadland Director? Yes Writer? Yes Producer? Yes Editor? Yes |
2020, Academy Awards, Won Best Picture & Best Director 2020, British Academy Film Awards, Won Best Film & Best Director 2020, Golden Globe Awards, Won Best Motion Picture - Drama & Best Director 2020, British Independent Film Awards, Won Best Foreign Independent Film 2020, Directors Guild of America Awards, Won Outstanding Director - Feature Film 2020, Gotham Independent Film Awards, Won Best Feature |
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Eternals Director? Yes Writer? Yes Producer? No |
| Film: | Awards: |
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Monster Director? Yes Writer? Yes Producer? No |
2004, Film Independent Spirit Awards, Won Best First Feature |
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Wonder Woman Director? Yes Writer? No Producer? No
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2017, Chicago Indie Critics Awards, Won Impact Award 2017, Philadelphia Film Critics Circle Awards, Won Steve Friedman Award 2018, Hugo Awards, Won Best Dramatic Presentation - Long Form 2018, National Board of Review Awards, Won Spotlight Award (shared with Actress Gal Gadot) |
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Wonder Woman 1984 Director? Yes Writer? Yes Producer? No |
2020, EntreNews Awards, Won Best Director & Best Film 2021, Kids Choice Awards, Won Favorite Movie 2021, Jupiter Awards, Won Best International Film 2021, Cape & Castle Awards, Won Best Superhero Movie of the Year & Best Movie of the Year 2021, Series Em Cena Awards, Won Best Movie of the Year |
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Notable Work:
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Monsters, Inc. - Won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "If I Didn't Have You"
Cars - Won the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature
Cars - Won the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film
Toy Story 3 - Won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song
Coco - Won the National Board of Review as the Best Animated Film
Coco - Won the Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song ("Remember Me")
Coco - Won Best Animated Film at the BAFTA Awards, Golden Globe Awards, Critic's Choice Movie Awards, and Annie Awards
This page celebrates films directed, produced, and edited by women. All of the films on the right are available through your RCBC library card either online through one of our databases or as a DVD. Want more? Check this list for over 1,000 films directed by women that you can view on Kanopy or this index of Women Film Editors hosted by Princeton.
Description from Kanopy:
Join high school-aged girls from around the world as they try to better their community through technology and collaboration in this thrilling, heartfelt documentary. By 2017, the app market will be valued at $77 Billion. Over 80% of these developers are male. The Technovation Challenge aims to change that by empowering girls worldwide to develop apps for an international competition. From rural Moldova to urban Brazil to suburban Massachusetts, CODEGIRL follows teams who dream of holding their own in the world's fastest-growing industry. The winning team gets $10K to complete and release their app, but every girl discovers something valuable along the way.
Description from Kanopy:
A whimsical romantic comedy that's raunchy and yet gentle, IT HAD TO BE YOU explores the choices women face today while satirizing cultural expectations of gender and romance.
Sonia is a neurotic jingle writer who's always dreamt of a big and exciting life. Surprised by a sudden proposal and subsequent ultimatum from her easy-going boyfriend, Chris, Sonia has to decide whether she'll join the ranks of her married friends or take a leap and pursue her fantasies.
Winner of Best Narrative Feature at the Woodstock Film Festival and the Bentonville Film Festival.
Description from Kanopy:
Cheryl Dunye plays a version of herself in this witty, nimble landmark of New Queer Cinema.
A video store clerk and fledgling filmmaker, Cheryl becomes obsessed with the "most beautiful mammy," a character she sees in a 1930s movie. Determined to find out who the actress she knows only as the "Watermelon Woman" was and make her the subject of a documentary, she starts researching and is bowled over to discover that not only was Fae Richards (Lisa Marie Bronson) a fellow Philadelphian but also a lesbian.
The project is not without drama as Cheryl's singular focus causes friction between her and her friend Tamara (Valarie Walker) and as she begins to see parallels between Fae's problematic relationship with a white director and her own budding romance with white Diana (fellow filmmaker Guinevere Turner).
Winner of Best Feature Film at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Description from Kanopy:
England, 1959. Free-spirited widow Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) risks everything to open a bookshop in a conservative East Anglian coastal town. While bringing about a surprising cultural awakening through works by Ray Bradbury and Vladimir Nabokov, she earns the polite but ruthless opposition of a local grand dame (Patricia Clarkson) and the support and affection of a reclusive book loving widower (Bill Nighy).
As Florence's obstacles amass and bear suspicious signs of a local power struggle, she is forced to ask: is there a place for a bookshop in a town that may not want one?
Winner of Best Film, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Goya Awards.
In the first fully painted feature film, 2018 Oscar-nominated LOVING VINCENT tells the story of the mysterious and tragic death of the world's most famous artist, Vincent van Gogh. Featuring the voices of Saoirse Ronan and Chris O'Dowd.
Nominated for Best Animated Feature Film at the 2018 Academy Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, and the BAFTA Awards.
Description from Kanopy:
In this Golden Globe-nominated psychological thriller, Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton plays Eva, the mother to her deeply disturbed son Kevin (Ezra Miller). Eva contends with her clueless husband (John C. Reilly) and her son's malevolent ways as the narrative builds to a chilling and unforgettable climax.
Nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama (Tilda Swinton) at the Golden Globes. Nominated for the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film, Best Leading Actress (Tilda Swinton), and Best Director at the BAFTA Awards.
Description from Kanopy:
A provocative, rousing and often humorous account of the birth of the modern women's liberation movement in the late 1960s through to its contemporary manifestations in the new millennium, direct from the women who lived it.
Best Documentary winner at the Independent Film Festival Boston. Nominated for Best Documentary at the Women Film Critics Circle Awards.
Description from Kanopy:
Sparked by a public display of sexual harassment in 2012, GTFO pries open the video game world to explore a 20 billion dollar industry that is riddled with discrimination and misogyny. Although half of all gamers are women, females are disproportionately subject to harassment and abuse from other gamers, and are massively under-represented in the video game design world.
Through interviews with video game developers, journalists, and academics, GTFO examines the female experience in gaming and begins a larger conversation that will shape the future of the video game world.
Description from Kanopy:
In 1965, when three women walked into the US House of Representatives in Washington D.C., they had come a very long way. Neither lawyers nor politicians, they were ordinary women from Mississippi, and descendants of African slaves. They had come to their country's capital seeking civil rights, the first black women to be allowed in the senate chambers in nearly 100 years.
A missing chapter in our nation's record of the Civil Rights movement, this powerful documentary reveals the movement in Mississippi in the 1950's and 60's from the point of view of the courageous women who lived it - and emerged as its grassroots leaders. Their living testimony offers a window into a unique moment when the founders' promise of freedom and justice passed from rhetoric to reality for all Americans.
Description from Kanopy:
Marianne is hired to paint the wedding portrait of Heloise. As the women orbit each other, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Heloise's first moments of freedom.
Nominated for Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language at the Golden Globes. Winner of Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.
Description from Kanopy:
In this award-winning documentary, Cecilia Fire Thunder- the first female President of the Oglala Sioux tribe, defies a proposed South Dakota law criminalizing all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest, by threatening to build a women's clinic on the sovereign territory of the reservation. She ignites a political firestorm that sets off a chain reaction in the lives of three young Lakotas on the Pine Ridge Reservation, forcing each of them to make choices that define who they are and the kind of adults they will become.
Description from Kanopy:
A PERFECT 14 explores the world of plus size models fighting to reshape the fashion industry and the beauty standards of society. The film follows the journeys of models Elly Mayday (Canada), Kerosene Deluxe (Netherlands) and Laura Wells (Australia) as they struggle against our culture's distorted perception of body image, and questions the fashion industry leaders and pioneers and holds them accountable for their responsibility in size-based segregation.
Description from Kanopy:
At the age of 85, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has developed a lengthy legal legacy while becoming an unexpected pop culture icon. Explore her unique and unknown personal journey of her rise to the nation's highest court.
Description from Kanopy:
There is a group of people in the world today who are more persecuted than anyone else, but they are not political or religious activists. They are girls. Being born a girl means you are more likely to be subjected to violence, disease, poverty and disadvantage than any other group on Earth.
In I AM A GIRL, we meet 14-year-old Kimsey from Cambodia, forced to sell her virginity at 12; Aziza from Afghanistan, who will be shot if she goes to school; Breani, a teen living in a ghetto of NYC and dreaming of stardom; Katie from Australia, who is recovering from a suicide attempt; Habiba from Cameroon, betrothed to a man 20 years her senior; and Manu from Papua New Guinea, about to become a mother at 14 following her first sexual encounter. As they come of age in the way their culture dictates, we see remarkable heart-warming stories of resilience, bravery and humor.
Description from Kanopy:
A critically important look at second wave feminism in the 1990's, a time rife with anti-feminist backlash. Powerful interviews with feminist leaders including bell hooks, Gloria Steinem, and Urvsahi Vaid are intercut with documentary sequences to engagingly explore the past and present and future status of the women's movement.
Discussing the unique contributions of second wave feminism, they explore their racial, economic and ideological differences and shared vision of achieving equality for women. An essential component of women's studies curricula, MY FEMINISM introduces feminism's key themes while exposing the cultural fears underlying the lesbian baiting, backlash, and political extremism which informed feminist dialogues in the 90's, some of which continues to this day.
Description from Kanopy:
This festival favorite documentary gets at the heart of a cultural phenomenon driven by an obsession with young female sexuality and internet popularity.
This ever growing phenom is told through Rio, a bona fide "Tokyo Idol" who takes us on her journey to fame. We meet her "brothers", a group of adult middle aged male super fans who devote their lives to following her--in the virtual world and in real life.
With her provocative look into the Japanese pop music industry and its focus on traditional beauty ideals, filmmaker Kyoko Miyake confronts the nature of gender power dynamics at work. As the female idols become younger and younger, Miyake offers a critique on the veil of internet fame and the new terms of engagement that are now playing out IRL around the globe.
Description from Kanopy:
Like drawing back a curtain to let bright light stream in, MISS REPRESENTATION uncovers a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see. Written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the film exposes how mainstream media contributes to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. The film challenges the media's limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average woman to feel powerful herself.
In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the collective message that our young women and men overwhelmingly receive is that a woman's value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity as a leader. While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades, the United States is still 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, women hold only 3% of clout positions in mainstream media, and 65% of women and girls have disordered eating behaviors.
Description from Kanopy:
Muslim women in Canada face challenges and uncertainties when they decide to start or stop wearing hijab, and encounter people with a variety of opinions. This candid and eye opening film challenges all viewers with emotions and humour, while revealing multiple perceptions and meanings of hijab that exist in our Western society.
Description from Kanopy:
THE MASK YOU LIVE IN follows boys and young men as they struggle to stay true to themselves while negotiating America's narrow definition of masculinity.
Pressured by the media, their peer group, and even the adults in their lives, our protagonists confront messages encouraging them to disconnect from their emotions, devalue authentic friendships, objectify and degrade women, and resolve conflicts through violence. These gender stereotypes interconnect with race, class, and circumstance, creating a maze of identity issues boys and young men must navigate to become "real" men.
Experts in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, sports, education, and media also weigh in, offering empirical evidence of the "boy crisis" and tactics to combat it. The Mask You Live In ultimately illustrates how we, as a society, can raise a healthier generation of boys and young men.
Description from Kanopy:
What do popular television makeover programs like What Not to Wear, The Biggest Loser, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and The Swan tell us about how to look and feel? What do they tell us about what a good life looks like in contemporary America? This new film based on Katherine Sender's book The Makeover explores these questions against the backdrop of American ideals of self-invention and upward mobility. Asking what it means to be an authentic self in an increasingly mediated world -- to be both ordinary and special, to be happy with who we are while always wanting something better -- BRAND NEW YOU shows how the interventions featured in makeover shows, from weight loss to cosmetic surgery, reproduce conventional norms of physical attractiveness and success. Taking a wider social and cultural view, it also shows how these programs have become models of self-transformation at precisely the same time jobs have become harder to find and keep, and women and men have been forced to remake themselves to compete in a rapidly changing labor marketplace.
Description from Kanopy:
This award winning documentary tells the haunting story of more than 350 kidnapped, raped and murdered young women from Juarez, Mexico. Visually poetic, yet unflinching in its gaze, this compelling investigation unravels the layers of complicity that have allowed for the brutal murders of women living along the Mexico-U.S. border.
Description from Kanopy:
Indonesia is home to the world's largest Muslim population. It is also home to the "warias," a community of biological men who live openly as women. In this eye-opening documentary, four warias search for romance and intimacy. They encounter a host of obstacles-- family pressures, economic burdens, aging-- but strive to stay true to themselves and to find lasting companionship. Shot over three years with the local queer community serving as story consultants and film crew members, the film provides an unprecedented look into topics rarely discussed in Western media: Indonesia, Islamic culture, and the daily life and struggles of transgender communities around the world.
Description from Kanopy:
A film portrait of the creative community of women writers, artists, photographers and editors (including Colette, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas) who flocked to the Left Bank of Paris in the early decades of the 20th century.
Utilizing groundbreaking research and newly discovered home movies, PARIS WAS A WOMAN re-creates the mood and flavor of this female artistic community in Paris during its most magical era.
Description from Kanopy:
This documentary features raw, powerful interviews with 18 diverse cisgender and transgender women about their sexual & reproductive health histories. Women from a variety of racial and ethnic, age, sexual orientation, and class backgrounds candidly recount their histories with sexual education, early sexual experiences, abortion, birth control, masturbation, relationships, gender transition, menstruation, STIs, gynecological exams, sexual assault, pregnancy, pleasure, and much more.
Challenging social taboo with unflinching candor, vulnerability, and often great humor, BREAK THE SILENCE catalyzes vitally important conversations around sexual education, health, autonomy, pleasure, and human rights.
Description from Kanopy:
A SUITABLE GIRL follows three young Indian women struggling to maintain their identities and follow their dreams amid intense pressure to get married. Documenting the arranged marriage and matchmaking process in verite for over four years, the film examines the women's complex relationship with marriage, family, and society.
Winner of the Albert Maysles New Documentary Director Award and nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Description from Kanopy:
This is the real-life version of "The Handmaid's Tale." In America today, a radical movement has tightened its grip on state power, seeking to control whether and how women bear children. In this crusade, pregnant women are subject to state control, surveillance, and punishment. Even women who don't want an abortion face shocking risks--like the pregnant woman in Alabama who faced criminal charges for taking half a Valium. Or like the grieving woman in Nebraska who, already devastated by a bleak diagnosis at 22 weeks, was forced to continue an unviable and dangerous pregnancy because of a new "fetal pain" law.
Description from Kanopy:
Against a backdrop of sex, politics, and race, ANITA reveals the intimate story of a woman who spoke truth to power.
An entire country watched as a poised, beautiful African-American woman sat before a Senate committee of 14 white men and with a clear, unwavering voice recounted the repeated acts of sexual harassment she had endured while working with U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill's graphic testimony was a turning point for gender equality in the U.S. and ignited a political firestorm about sexual harassment and power in the workplace that resonates still today.
Description from Kanopy:
Directed by Greta Gerwig and nominated for five Oscars, LADY BIRD is a warm, affecting comedy about a high schooler (Saoirse Ronan) who must navigate a loving but turbulent relationship with her strong-willed mother (Laurie Metcalf) over the course of her eventful and poignant senior year of high school.
Description from Kanopy:
The award-winning documentary film THE GIRLS IN THE BAND tells the poignant, untold stories of female jazz and big band instrumentalists and their fascinating, history-making journeys from the late 30s to the present day. The many first-hand accounts of the challenges faced by these talented women provide a glimpse into decades of racism and sexism that have existed in America.
Description from Kanopy:
Hundreds of thousands of cats roam the metropolis of Istanbul freely. For thousands of years they've wandered in and out of people's lives, becoming an essential part of the communities that make the city so rich.
Winner of Best First Documentary and nominated for Best Documentary at the Critics' Choice Documentary Awards. Fourth Place for Best Documentary (2017) in the Indiewire Critics' Poll.
Description from Kanopy:
The most turbulent five years in the life of a genius woman: Between 1905, where Marie Curie comes with Pierre Curie to Stockholm to be awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the radioactivity and 1911, where she receives her second Nobel Prize.
