124 cineastas mujeres que según la Filmoteca son esenciales.
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- Director
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- Actress
Maya Deren came to the USA in 1922 as Eleanora Derenkowsky. Together with her father Solomon Derenkowsky, a psychiatrist, and her mother Maria Fidler, an artist, she fled the pogroms organized by the Bolsheviks against the Jews. She studied journalism and political science at the Syracuse University in New York, finishing her BA at the New York University (NYU) in June 1936, and then received her MA in English literature from the Smith College in 1939.
In 1943, she made her first film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), co-starring with Alexander Hammid. Through this association, at Hammid's suggestion, she changed her name to Maya, meaning "illusion." Overall, she made six short films and several incomplete films, including Witch's Cradle (1944) starring Marcel Duchamp.
Deren is the author of two books, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film" 1946 (reprinted in "The Legend of Maya Deren," vol 1, part 2) and "Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti" (1953)--a book that was made after her first trip to Haiti in 1947 and which is still considered one of the most useful on Haitian Voudoun. Deren wrote numerous articles on film and on Haiti. Maya Deren shot over 18,000 feet of film in Haiti from 1947 to 1954 on Haitian Voudoun, parts of which can be viewed in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1993) made after her death by her then-husband Teiji Ito and his new wife Cherel Ito.
In 1947, Maya Deren became the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim grant for creative work in motion pictures. She wrote film theory, distributed her own films, traveled across the USA, and went to Cuba and Canada to promote her films using the lecture-demonstration format to teach film theory, and Voudoun and the interrelationship of magic, science, and religion. Deren established the Creative Film Foundation in the late 1950s to reward the achievements of independent filmmakers.Meshes of the afternoon es su corto más conocido, y junto con otros cortos, se puede encontrar en YouTube.- Director
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Rita Azevedo Gomes is known for The Portuguese Woman (2018), Correspondences (2016) and O Trio em Mi Bemol (2022).La más importante cineasta portuguesa actualmente.- Director
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- Script and Continuity Department
Anja Breien was born on 12 July 1940 in Oslo, Norway. She is a director and writer, known for Next of Kin (1979), Hustruer (1975) and Papirfuglen (1984).Cineasta noruega cuyo film más interesante parece ser Caza de brujas (Forfolgelsen, 1981).- Producer
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Barbara Kopple was born on 30 July 1946 in New York City, New York, USA. She is a producer and director, known for Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), American Dream (1990) and Shut Up & Sing (2006).- Director
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Josefina Molina was born on 14 November 1936 in Córdoba, Córdoba, Andalucía, Spain. She is a director and writer, known for Esquilache (1989), The Most Natural Thing (1991) and Entre naranjos (1998).- Writer
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A director, producer, writer, marketer and film distributor, Ava DuVernay made her feature film debut with the documentary This is the Life (2008), a history on hip hop movement that flourished in Los Angeles in the 1990's. This was followed by series of television music documentaries which included My Mic Sounds Nice (2010) which aired on BET.
DuVernay's first narrative feature film, I Will Follow (2010), secured her the African-American Film Critics Association award for best screenplay. Her follow-up, Middle of Nowhere (2012) won the Best Director Prize at the 2012 Sundance film festival, making her the first African-American woman to receive the award.Directora de la serie When they see us y de la película Selma, entre otras obras bien valoradas.- Actress
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Valeria Bruni Tedeschi was born on 16 November 1964 in Turin, Piedmont, Italy. She is an actress and writer, known for Like Crazy (2016), Il est plus facile pour un chameau... (2003) and Human Capital (2013).- Actress
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Born into a family of doctors and educated in China at the Shanghai Film Academy and the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Languages, Joan Chen was discovered by veteran Chinese director Jin Xie while observing a filming with a school group. Her performance in Xiao hua (1979) (A.K.A. "The Little Flower") won China's Best Actress award, and resulted in the Chinese press dubbing her "The Elizabeth Taylor of China" for having achieved top stardom while still in her teen years. She came to the U.S. to attend college in 1981, first at the State University of New York at New Paltz, later at California State University at Northridge. She a succession of small parts in movies and T.V., with her first break coming in 1986 when, in true Hollywood legend, producer Dino De Laurentiis noticed her in the parking lot of Lorimar Studios and cast her in Tai-Pan (1986). The film bombed, but it led to her being cast as the ill-fated Empress in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), which won critical acclaim. This, and her role as enigmatic mill owner Josie Packard in the cult TV series Twin Peaks (1990), are her best-known roles in Europe and North America. However, Hollywood's practice of type-casting East Asians has led to a dearth of major roles for Chen since then, and in recent roles, she has often been cast as a villainess.
After taking a few years off to start a family, Joan returned to the screen in important supporting roles playing women in early middle age, such as the mother of a principle adult character. As a result, her career is flourishing again on both sides of the Pacific. Her two directing efforts were well-received critically, and in a 2008 interview she revealed she planned to direct again but was putting that off until her daughters were grown, since directing took her away from them too much, whereas acting could be done on a part-time basis.- Director
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Accomplished Film Director/Writer/Producer Mira Nair was born in India and educated at Delhi University and at Harvard. She began her film career as an actor and then turned to directing award-winning documentaries, including So Far From India and India Cabaret. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988; it won the Camera D'Or (for best first feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry) at the Cannes Film Festival and 25 other international awards. Her next film, Mississippi Masala, an interracial love story set in the American South and Uganda, starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, won three awards at the Venice Film Festival including Best Screenplay and The Audience Choice Award. Subsequent films include The Perez Family (with Marisa Tomei, Anjelica Huston, Alfred Molina and Chazz Palminteri), about an exiled Cuban family in Miami; and the sensuous Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, which she directed and co-wrote. Nair directed My Own Country based on Dr. Abraham Verghese's best-selling memoir about a young immigrant doctor dealing with the AIDS epidemic. Made in 1998, My Own Country starred Naveen Andrews, Glenne Headly, Marisa Tomei, Swoosie Kurtz, and Hal Holbrook, and was awarded the NAACP award for best fiction feature. Nair returned to the documentary form in August 1999 with The Laughing Club of India, which was awarded The Special Jury Prize in the Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels 2000. In the summer of 2000, Nair shot Monsoon Wedding in 30 days, a story of a Punjabi wedding starring Naseeruddin Shah and an ensemble of Indian actors. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, Monsoon Wedding also won a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and opened worldwide to tremendous critical and commercial acclaim. Nair's next feature was an HBO original film, Hysterical Blindness. Set in working class New Jersey in 1987, the film stars Uma Thurman, Juliette Lewis, Gena Rowlands. Thurman and Lewis play single women looking for love in all the wrong places, while Rowlands, who plays Thurman's mother, adds to her daughter's hysteria when she finds Mr. Right in Ben Gazarra. The film received great critical acclaim and the highest ratings for HBO, garnering an audience of 15 million, a Golden Globe for Uma Thurman, and 3 Emmy Awards. Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Nair joined a group of 11 renowned filmmakers, each commissioned to direct a film that was 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame long. Nair's film is a retelling of real events in the life of the Hamdani family in Queens, whose eldest son was missing after September 11, and was then accused by the media of being a terrorist. 11.09.01 is the true story of a mother's search for her son who did not return home on that fateful day. In May 2003, Nair helmed the Focus Features production of the Thackeray classic, Vanity Fair, a provocative period tale set in post-colonial England, in which Reese Witherspoon plays the lead, Becky Sharp. The film is scheduled to release in Fall 2004. Nair's upcoming projects include Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul for HBO, and Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist, and there are also plans to take Monsoon Wedding to Broadway. Mirabai Films is establishing an annual filmmaker's laboratory, Maisha, which will be dedicated to the support of visionary screenwriters and directors in East Africa and India. The first lab, which is only for screenwriters, will be launched in August 2005 in Kampala, Uganda.Salaam Bombay!, Mississipi Massala, y La boda del monzón, que no me gusta nada.- Actress
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Diane Kurys was born on 3 December 1948 in Lyon, Rhône, France. She is an actress and director, known for For a Woman (2013), Entre Nous (1983) and Peppermint Soda (1977).La más interesante parece Entre nosotras (1983).- Director
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Lois Weber, who had been a street-corner evangelist before entering motion pictures in 1905, became the first American woman movie director of note, and a major one at that. Herbert Blaché, the husband of Frenchwoman Alice Guy, the first woman to direct a motion picture (and arguably, the first director of either gender to helm a fictional narrative film), cast her in the lead of "Hypocrites" (1908). Weber first got behind the camera on A Heroine of '76 (1911), a silent that was co-directed by pioneering American director Edwin S. Porter and actor Phillips Smalley, who played George Washington. She also starred in the picture.
In 1914, a year in which she helmed 27 movies, Weber co-directed William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1914) with Smalley, who also played Shylock, making her the first woman to direct a feature-length film in the US. (Jeanie Macpherson, who would play a major role in cinema as Cecil B. DeMille's favorite screenwriter, also acted in the film).
In the spirit of her evangelism, she began directing, writing and then producing films of social import, dealing with such themes as abortion, alcoholism, birth control, drug addiction and prostitution. By 1916 she had established herself as the top director at Universal Film Manufacturing (now Universal Studios), the top studio in America at the time, making her the highest-paid director in the world. The following year she formed Lois Weber Productions.
She directed over 100 films, but her production company went bankrupt in the 1920s as her career faltered. She did not make the transition to sound, although she did make one talkie, White Heat (1934), in 1934.- Director
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A very talented painter, Kathryn spent two years at the San Francisco Art Institute. At 20, she won a scholarship to the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She was given a studio in a former Offtrack Betting building, literally in an old bank vault, where she made art and waited to be critiqued by people like Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Sontag. Later she earned a scholarship to study film at Columbia University School of Arts, graduating in 1979. She was also a member of the British avant garde cultural group, Art and Language. Kathryn is the only child of the manager of a paint factory and a librarian.- Actress
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The Davenport family was well known in theatrical circles. Her aunt, Fanny Davenport was considered one of the greatest stage actresses of her time and her father, Harry Davenport, was a Broadway star before later venturing into movies. Her mother, Alice Davenport, was a respected Broadway and film actress. With a background on the stage, Dorothy was in her early teens when she started playing bit parts in films. By the time she was 17, she was a star at Universal, where she would meet a young actor-assistant director-gopher-scenario writer named Wallace Reid. Called on to act with him in a film, she was frustrated by his apparent lack of acting ability on the first day, but was smitten with him on the third day of their work together. Dorothy was a horsewoman of distinction who had no regard for a man who couldn't stay in the saddle. When Wallace proved to be an excellent horseman, she was hooked.
After six months working on a job with another film company, Wallace returned to Universal and they married on October 13, 1913. The newlyweds continued to work. He directed and starred with Dorothy in two films a week for the next year. When Wallace left Universal Dorothy also left films, returning in 1916 to appear in a handful of them. In 1917 she gave birth to Wallace Reid Jr. and became a full-time mother and wife.
When Wallace Reid died from morphine addiction in 1923, Dorothy and Bessie Love made Human Wreckage (1923), a film that dealt with the dangers of narcotics. Dorothy would not return to the screen again until she directed and acted in The Red Kimono (1926). Dorothy later in life dabbled as a producer and a writer.- Director
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Helena Taberna was born in Alsasua, Spain. She is known for La buena nueva (2008), Yoyes (2000) and The Cliff (2016).- Director
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- Animation Department
Hermína Týrlová was born on 11 December 1900 in Brezové Hory, Austria-Hungary [now Czech Republic]. She was a director and writer, known for Snehulák (1966), Uzel na kapesníku (1958) and Hvezda Betlémská (1970). She died on 3 May 1993 in Zlín, Czech Republic.- Director
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Born to a military family. Attends law studies before starting a newspaper career. In 1960 starts on TV. Joins the Socialist Party in 1976 and conducts the electoral campaign in 1982 and in the same year she is designated General Director of Cinema. Resigning in 1985, the next year she joins the State Television (RTE). The last work was the coverage of the Royal Wedding of Infanta Cristina in Barcelona (October 1997 ).El pájaro de la felicidad, El crimen de Cuenca, entre otros títulos interesantes aunque no perfectos.- Actress
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Ida was born in London to a show business family. In 1932, her mother took Ida with her to an audition and Ida got the part her mother wanted. The picture was Her First Affaire (1932). Ida, a bleached blonde, went to Hollywood in 1934 playing small, insignificant parts. Peter Ibbetson (1935) was one of her few noteworthy movies and it was not until The Light That Failed (1939) that she got a chance to get better parts. In most of her movies, she was cast as the hard, but sympathetic woman from the wrong side of the tracks. In The Sea Wolf (1941) and High Sierra (1940), she played the part magnificently. It has been said that no one could do hard-luck dames the way Lupino could do them. She played tough, knowing characters who held their own against some of the biggest leading men of the day - Humphrey Bogart, Ronald Colman, John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson. She made a handful of films during the forties playing different characters ranging from Pillow to Post (1945), where she played a traveling saleswoman to the tough nightclub singer in The Man I Love (1946). But good roles for women were hard to get and there were many young actresses and established stars competing for those roles. She left Warner Brothers in 1947 and became a freelance actress. When better roles did not materialize, Ida stepped behind the camera as a director, writer and producer. Her first directing job came when director Elmer Clifton fell ill on a script that she co-wrote Not Wanted (1949). Ida had joked that as an actress, she was the poor man's Bette Davis. Now, she said that as a director, she became the poor man's Don Siegel. The films that she wrote, or directed, or appeared in during the fifties were mostly inexpensive melodramas. She later turned to television where she directed episodes in shows such as The Untouchables (1959) and The Fugitive (1963). In the seventies, she made guest appearances on various television show and appeared in small parts in a few movies.- Director
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Alice Rohrwacher was born on 29 December 1981 in Fiesole, Tuscany, Italy. She is a director and writer, known for Happy as Lazzaro (2018), La Chimera (2023) and The Wonders (2014).- Director
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Larisa Shepitko was born on 6 January 1938 in Bakhmut, Ukrainian SSR, USSR [now Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine]. She was a director and writer, known for The Ascent (1977), Heat (1963) and You and Me (1971). She was married to Elem Klimov. She died on 2 July 1979 in near Redkino, Kalinin Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR.- Director
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Lotte Reiniger was born on 2 June 1899 in Berlin, Germany. She was a director and writer, known for Silhouetten (1936), Der Graf von Carabas (1935) and Lotte Reiniger - The Fairy Tale Films (1961). She was married to Carl Koch. She died on 19 June 1981 in Dettenhausen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.- Director
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Deepa Mehta is a transnational artist and a screenwriter, director, and producer whose work has been called "courageous", "provocative" and "breathtaking". Her visually lush and emotionally resonating films have played at every major international film festival; receiving numerous awards and accolades, and have been distributed around the world. Deepa was born in India and received a degree in philosophy from the University of New Delhi before immigrating to Canada. She began her career making documentaries in India.
In 1991, Deepa's first feature film Sam & Me, which stars Om Puri, won a Special Jury Mention in the Camera D'Or section at the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1992-1994 she directed two episodes of The Young Indiana Jones, produced by George Lucas for ABC. In 1993, Deepa directed her second feature film Camilla, a Canada-UK co-pro starring Jessica Tandy, Bridget Fonda, Elias Koteas, Maury Chaykin, Graham Greene, and Hume Cronyn. Fire, which Deepa wrote and directed, is the first film in her Elemental Trilogy (Fire, Earth, Water). Fire opened Perspective Canada at the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival, where it was runner-up for the People's Choice Most Popular Film Award. It played at the New York Film Festival and won many awards worldwide, including the Audience Award for Best Canadian Film at the Vancouver International Festival, the Special Jury Prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival and Silver Hugo Awards for Best Direction and Best Actress in Chicago.
Earth, based on Bapsi Sidhwa's acclaimed novel about Partition, Cracking India, is the second film in the Elemental Trilogy. It premiered as a Special Presentation at the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival, and won the Prix Premiere du Public at the Festival du Film Asiatique de Deauville and the Critics' Award at the Verona Schermi d'Amore International Film Festival. Bollywood/Hollywood was a change of pace. Written and directed by Deepa, it is a lighthearted, affectionate comedy about two mismatched lovers. It opened Perspective Canada at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and was a tremendous crossover box office success. It remains one of the top 10 grossing English language Canadian movies. In 2003 Deepa co-wrote and directed the Canada-UK co-pro The Republic of Love, based on a Carol Shields novel.
After a disrupted and hazardous production history Deepa's final film in the Elemental Trilogy Water opened the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, and was the first Canadian film acquired by US distributor Fox Searchlight. Water is a powerful, hauntingly tragic story, set in Benares (Varanasi) about a child widow who at the age of eight is forced to enter a house of widows where she has to live for the rest of her life. The movie was to have been shot in India in 2000, but Hindu fundamentalists fomented riots, burnt sets, and issued death threats against the director and actors, forcing production to shut down and the filmmakers to leave the country. Water was successfully remounted in Sri Lanka and completed shooting in June 2004, and features many of India's most renowned actors.
Water was an enormous success. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 79th Annual Academy Awards, and has screened at festivals around the world, winning many awards, and remains an audience favourite. The Vancouver Film Critics Circle named Deepa Mehta the Best Canadian Director of 2006. This fall (2015) is the 10th anniversary of Water's launch.
In 2006 Deepa made a documentary about domestic violence in Toronto's immigrant families called Let's Talk About It, which continues to be used in community outreach programs. She then thematically segued into the feature film Heaven On Earth, which explores arranged marriages and isolation. Starring Preity Zinta, the film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008. It was awarded a Silver Hugo for Best Actress at the Chicago International Film Festival, and received the Best Screenplay Award at the Dubai International Film Festival. It also won the Youth Jury Award at the Schermi d'Amore Film Festival in Verona and the Audience Award at the River to River Florence Indian Film Festival.
In 2012, Deepa completed her epic cinematic adaptation of Salman Rushdie's famous novel about the history of India in the 20th century, Midnight's Children. A novel that won three Booker prizes. The movie, with 127 speaking parts, and covering five distinct time periods from 1917-1977, was a vast, ambitious undertaking and has screened all over the world, including the Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, and the BFI London Film Festival. Midnight's Children was chosen as the Best Feature Film of 2013 at the Directors Guild of Canada's Awards.
Deepa's work as an artist, as a progressive voice about social issues, and her generous mentorship have often been recognized. She has received numerous honorary degrees and many awards and honours, among them: The Life of Distinction Award from the Canadian Centre of Diversity, The Excellence in the Arts Award from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the Woman of Distinction, President's Award from the YMCA. She is a recipient of the Governor General's Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award for Film. Most recently, in 2013, Deepa was appointed as an officer to the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honour, for her work as a "groundbreaking screenwriter, director, and producer." She is also a recipient of the province of Ontario's highest honour, the Order of Ontario.Cineasta hindú cuyo film Fire trata el lesbianismo.- Director
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Marjane Satrapi was born on 22 November 1969 in Rasht, Iran. She is a director and actress, known for Persepolis (2007), The Voices (2014) and Chicken with Plums (2011). She is married to Mattias Ripa. She was previously married to Reza.- Director
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Though Academy Award®, Golden Globe Award and Emmy Award winning writer and director Susanne Bier's work often plays out against a wide-reaching global backdrop, its focus is intimate, carefully exploring the explosive emotions and complexities of familial bonds. This unique combination is part of the formula that has made her Denmark's leading female filmmaker and a powerhouse worldwide.
Bier's 2010 film In a Better World won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2011, as well as an Italian Golden Globe Award® for Best European Film and Best Director at the European Film Awards. She previously helmed the multi-award-winning After the Wedding (2006), which was also an Academy Award® nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, and was remade as an English-language film in 2019 starring Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, and Billy Crudup.
Bier won an Emmy Award in 2016 for directing the six-part AMC mini-series The Night Manager, based on the 1993 novel of the same name by John le Carré, with stars Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, and Olivia Colman all winning Golden Globes for their work.
Bier followed this with the 2018 Netflix film Bird Box, starring Sandra Bullock, which went on to become the most-watched film in Netflix history. In 2020, she directed the six-part HBO series The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, the network's first original series to grow its audience each week.
Prior to this, Bier co-wrote and directed the romantic comedy The One and Only (1999), which won Best Film at the Danish Robert Awards and was the most watched domestic film in Denmark in 20 years, with one-fifth of the country's population having seen it at the cinema.
In 2002, she directed Open Hearts, shot in accordance with the Dogme '95 filmmaking aesthetic. The film won numerous awards, including the Audience Award at the Robert Festival (Danish Academy Award) and the International Film Critics' Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Bier followed this with Brothers (2004), which won, among others, the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.
In 2007, Bier directed the award-winning Things We Lost in the Fire, starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro, her first English-language film.
In 2012, Bier made her triumphant return to the genre with the 2013 winner of the European Film Award for Best Comedy, Love Is All You Need, starring Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm. In 2014, Bier directed A Second Chance, starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Most recently, Susanne Bier directed the Showtime limited series The First Lady, starring Viola Davis, Michelle Pfieffer, and Gillian Anderson.- Actress
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Agnès Jaoui was born on 19 October 1964 in Antony, Hauts-de-Seine, France. She is an actress and writer, known for The Taste of Others (2000), Look at Me (2004) and Family Resemblances (1996). She was previously married to Jean-Pierre Bacri.- Director
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Agnès Varda was born on 30 May 1928 in Ixelles, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985) and Faces Places (2017). She was married to Jacques Demy. She died on 29 March 2019 in Paris, France.- Director
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Having graduated from FAMU in Prague film (1971), Agnieszka Holland returned to Poland and began her film career working with Krzysztof Zanussi as assistant director, and Andrzej Wajda as her mentor. Her first feature film was PROVINCIAL ACTORS (1978), one of the flagship pictures of the "cinema of moral disquiet" and the winner of the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980. Subsequently, she made the films FEVER (1980) and THE LONELY WOMAN (1981). In 1981, just before the declaration of the state of emergency in Poland, Agnieszka Holland emigrated to France.
She directed ANGRY HARVEST (1985) which was nominated for a foreign-language Oscar. Her film EUROPA EUROPA (1990) also received a U.S. Academy Award nomination (best screenplay) and IN DARKNESS (2011) was again nominated as best foreign-language film. She also collaborated with her friend Krzysztof Kieslowski on the screenplay of his trilogy, THREE COLOURS (1993).
Holland's other films include TO KILL A PRIEST (1988), OLIVIER, OLIVIER (1992), THE SECRET GARDEN (1993), TOTAL ECLIPSE (1995), WASHINGTON SQUARE (1997), THE THIRD MIRACLE (1999), SHOT IN THE HEART (2001), JULIE WALKING HOME (2001), COPYING BEETHOVEN (2006), IN DARKNESS (2011), BURNING BUSH (2013), SPOOR (2017), MR. JONES (2019) and CHARLATAN (2020). She also directed several episodes of many notable TV series, including THE WIRE, JAG, COLD CASE, TREME (for the pilot of the latter she was nominated for an Emmy) and HOUSE OF CARDS. Agnieszka Holland has also written or co-written screenplays for films made by other directors and directed plays for Polish television. She was elected chairwoman of the Board of the European Film Academy in 2014 and was elected as its President in 2021.- Director
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The world's first female filmmaker, French-born Alice Guy entered the film business in 1896 as a secretary at Gaumont, a manufacturer of movie cameras and projectors who had purchased a "cinématographer" from its inventors, the Lumiere brothers. The next year Gaumont became the world's first motion picture production company when they switched to creating movies, and Guy became its first film director. She impressed the company so much with the output (she averaged two two-reelers a week) and quality of her productions that by 1905 she was made the company's production director, supervising its other directors. In 1907 she married Herbert Blaché, an Englishman who ran Gaumont's British and German offices. The pair went to the U.S. to set up the company's operations there. In 1910 Mme. Guy set up her own production company, Solax, in New York and with her husband built a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After a period of critical and financial success, the couple's fortunes declined when Thomas Alva Edison's trust hindered film production in the East coast, and they eventually shut down the studio in 1919. Although her husband secured work directing films for several major Hollywood studios, Guy was never able to secure any directorial jobs there, never made a film again, most of her films were lost, some were credited to other film directors, and she did no receive recognition for her pioneering work in France and the United States. She returned to France in 1922 after her divorce from Blaché, and in 1964 returned to the U.S. and lived in Mahwah, New Jersey - not far from where her original studios were - with her daughter, where she died in 1968.- Actress
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Amma Asante is a British BAFTA award winning screenwriter and director, known for Belle (2013), and A Way of Life (2004). She is a former child actress, who began her writing career at the age of 23 with a script deals from both Channel 4 in the UK and BBC. Her first movie, A Way of Life, which she wrote and directed won her numerous awards, both in the UK and internationally, including FIPRESCI prizes and the Carl Foreman BAFTA Film Award. In 2017 Amma was awarded an MBE on the Queen's New Year's Honours List, for her services to film as a writer and director.Cineasta negra.- Director
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Ana Lily Amirpour was born in Margate, Kent, England, UK. She is a director and writer, known for A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), The Bad Batch (2016) and Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (2021).La directora de Una chica vuelve a casa sola de noche.- Actress
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Ana Mariscal was born on 31 July 1923 in Madrid, Spain. She was an actress and director, known for Segundo López, aventurero urbano (1953), Una sombra en la ventana (1945) and Un hombre va por el camino (1949). She was married to Valentín Javier. She died on 28 March 1995 in Madrid, Spain.- Actress
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Andrea Arnold was born on 5 April 1961 in Dartford, Kent, England, UK. She is an actress and director, known for American Honey (2016), Fish Tank (2009) and Red Road (2006).Una de las más interesantes, autora de American honey, Red road y Fish tank.- Writer
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Ángeles González Sinde was born in 1965 in Madrid, Madrid, Spain. She is a writer and actress, known for Una palabra tuya (2008), La suerte dormida (2003) and Lucky Star (1997).- Actress
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Angelina Jolie is an Academy Award-winning actress who rose to fame after her role in Girl, Interrupted (1999), playing the title role in the "Lara Croft" blockbuster movies, as well as Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Wanted (2008), Salt (2010) and Maleficent (2014). Off-screen, Jolie has become prominently involved in international charity projects, especially those involving refugees. She often appears on many "most beautiful women" lists, and she has a personal life that is avidly covered by the tabloid press.
Jolie was born Angelina Jolie Voight in Los Angeles, California. In her earliest years, Angelina began absorbing the acting craft from her actor parents, Jon Voight, an Oscar-winner, and Marcheline Bertrand, who had studied with Lee Strasberg. Her good looks may derive from her ancestry, which is German and Slovak on her father's side, and French-Canadian, Dutch, Polish, and remote Huron, on her mother's side. At age eleven, Angelina began studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she was seen in several stage productions. She undertook some film studies at New York University and later joined the renowned Met Theatre Group in Los Angeles. At age 16, she took up a career in modeling and appeared in some music videos.
In the mid-1990s, Jolie appeared in various small films where she got good notices, including Hackers (1995) and Foxfire (1996). Her critical acclaim increased when she played strong roles in the made-for-TV movies True Women (1997), and in George Wallace (1997) which won her a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy nomination. Jolie's acclaim increased even further when she played the lead role in the HBO production Gia (1998). This was the true life story of supermodel Gia Carangi, a sensitive wild child who was both brazen and needy and who had a difficult time handling professional success and the deaths of people who were close to her. Carangi became involved with drugs and because of her needle-using habits she became, at the tender age of 26, one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS. Jolie's performance in Gia (1998) again garnered a Golden Globe Award and another Emmy nomination, and she additionally earned a SAG Award.
Angelina got a major break in 1999 when she won a leading role in the successful feature The Bone Collector (1999), starring alongside Denzel Washington. In that same year, Jolie gave a tour de force performance in Girl, Interrupted (1999) playing opposite Winona Ryder. The movie was a true story of women who spent time in a psychiatric hospital. Jolie's role was reminiscent of Jack Nicholson's character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), the role which won Nicholson his first Oscar. Unlike "Cuckoo", "Girl" was a small film that received mixed reviews and barely made money at the box office. But when it came time to give out awards, Jolie won the triple crown -- "Girl" propelled her to win the Golden Globe Award, the SAG Award and the Academy Award for best leading actress in a supporting role.
With her newfound prominence, Jolie began to get in-depth attention from the press. Numerous aspects of her controversial personal life became news. At her wedding to her Hackers (1995) co-star Jonny Lee Miller, she had displayed her husband's name on the back of her shirt painted in her own blood. Jolie and Miller divorced, and in 2000, she married her Pushing Tin (1999) co-star Billy Bob Thornton. Jolie had become the fifth wife of a man twenty years her senior. During her marriage to Thornton, the spouses each wore a vial of the other's blood around their necks. That marriage came apart in 2002 and ended in divorce. In addition, Jolie was estranged from her famous father, Jon Voight.
In 2000, Jolie was asked to star in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001). At first, she expressed disinterest, but then decided that the required training for the athletic role was intriguing. The eponymous character was drawn from a popular video game. Lara Croft was a female cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond. When the movie was released, critics were unimpressed with the final product, but critical acclaim wasn't the point of the movie. The public paid $275 million for theater tickets to see a buffed up Jolie portray the adventuresome Lara Croft. Jolie's father Jon Voight appeared in the movie, and during filming there was a brief rapprochement between father and daughter.
One of the Lara Croft movie's filming locations was Cambodia. While there, Jolie witnessed the natural beauty, culture and poverty of that country. She considered this an eye opening experience, and so began the humanitarian chapter of her life. Jolie began visiting refugee camps around the world and came to be formally appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Some of her experiences were written and published in her popular book "Notes from My Travels" whose profits go to UNHCR.
Jolie has stated that she now plans to spend most of her time in humanitarian efforts, to be financed by her actress salary. She devotes one third of her income to savings, one third to living expenses and one third to charity. In 2002, Angelina adopted a Cambodian refugee boy named Maddox, and in 2005, adopted an Ethiopian refugee girl named Zahara. Jolie's dramatic feature film Beyond Borders (2003) parallels some of her real life humanitarian experiences although, despite the inclusion of a romance between two westerners, many of the movie's images were too depressingly realistic -- the movie was not popular among critics or at the box office.
In 2004, Jolie began filming Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) with co-star Brad Pitt. The movie became a major box office success. There were rumors that Pitt and Jolie had an affair while filming Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Jolie insisted that because her mother had been hurt by adultery, she herself could never participate in an affair with a married man, therefore there had been no affair with Pitt at that time. Nonetheless, Pitt separated from his wife Jennifer Aniston in January 2005 and, in the months that followed, he was frequently seen in public with Jolie, apparently as a couple. Pitt's divorce was finalized later in 2005.
Jolie and Pitt announced in early 2006 that they would have a child together, and Jolie gave birth to daughter Shiloh that May. They also adopted a three-year-old Vietnamese boy named Pax. The couple, who married in 2014 and divorced in 2019, continue to pursue movie and humanitarian projects, and now have a total of six children. She was appointed Honorary Dame Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George at the 2014 Queen's Birthday Honours for her services to United Kingdom foreign policy and the campaign to end warzone sexual violence.- Costume and Wardrobe Department
Ann Hui is known for Chinese Kamasutra (1994).- Director
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Antonia Bird was born on 27 May 1951 in London, England, UK. She was a director and producer, known for Priest (1994), Face (1997) and Ravenous (1999). She was married to Ian Ilett. She died on 24 October 2013 in London, England, UK.- Writer
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Axelle Ropert was born on 15 February 1972 in Paris, France. She is a writer and actress, known for La famille Wolberg (2009), Étoile violette (2005) and Petite Solange (2021).- Actress
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A one-time pin-up beauty and magazine story model, Barbara Loden studied acting in New York in the early 50s and was on the Broadway boards within the decade. She was discovered for films by legendary producer/director Elia Kazan who was impressed with what she did in a small role as Montgomery Clift's secretary in Wild River (1960). He moved her up to feature status with her next role as Warren Beatty's wanton sister in his classic Splendor in the Grass (1961). As Kazan's protégé, she appeared as part of Kazan's stage company in the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater's production of After the Fall, winning the Tony and Outer Critic's Circle awards for that dazzling performance. An oddly entrancing, delicate blonde beauty possessed with a Marilyn Monroe-like vulnerability, she impressed in two of his other stage productions as well - But For Whom Charlie and The Changeling . After appearing in the failed movie Fade In (1973) with Burt Reynolds, she married Kazan and went into semi-retirement. Barbara wrote, directed and starred, however, in a bold independent film entitled Wanda (1970) and became an unexpected art house darling, distinguishing herself as one of the few woman directors whose work was theatrically-released during the period. She won praise in all three departments, nabbing the Venice Film Festival's International Critics Prize. Supposedly discouraged by a doubting, perhaps even resentful Kazan, Barbara never followed up on this success. She expressed interest and was in the midst of putting together another film, based on the novella The Awakening by Kate Chopin, when she learned in 1978 she had breast cancer. Barbara died two and a half years later, at age 48, after the cancer spread to her liver - before the project ever came to fruition. The Hollywood industry lost a burgeoning talent who just might have opened doors for other women directors had she been given the time.- Music Artist
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Barbra Streisand is an American singer, actress, director and producer and one of the most successful personalities in show business. She is the only person ever to receive all of the following: Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Grammy, Golden Globe, Cable Ace, National Endowment for the Arts, and Peabody awards, as well as the Kennedy Center Honor, American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement honor and the Film Society of Lincoln Center Chaplin Award.
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942 to Diana Kind (née Ida Rosen), a singer turned school secretary, and Emanuel Streisand, a high school teacher. Her father died when she was 15 months old. She has a brother, Sheldon, and a half-sister, Roslyn Kind, from their mother's remarriage. As a child she attended the Beis Yakov Jewish School in Brooklyn. She was raised in a middle-class family and grew up dreaming of becoming an actress (or even an actress / conductor, as she happily described her teenage years at one of her concerts).
After a period as a nightclub singer and off-Broadway performer in New York City she began to attract interest and a fan base, thanks to her original and powerful vocal talent. She debuted on Broadway in the 1962 musical comedy "I Can Get It For You Wholesale" by Harold Rome, receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress and a New York Drama Critics Poll award. The following year she reached great commercial success with her first Columbia Records solo releases, "The Barbra Streisand Album" (multiple Grammy winner, including "Best Album of the Year") and "The Second Barbra Streisand Album" (her first RIAA Gold Album); these albums, mostly devoted to composer Harold Arlen, brought her critical praise and, most of all, public acclaim all over the US. In 1964 she had another smash Broadway hit when she portrayed legendary Broadway star Fanny Brice in "Funny Girl" by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill; the show's main song, "People", became her first hit single and she appeared on the cover of Time magazine. After many TV appearances as a guest on various music and variety shows (such as an episode of The Judy Garland Show (1963), for which she was nominated for an Emmy), she signed an exclusive contract with CBS for a series of annual TV specials. My Name Is Barbra (1965) (which won an Emmy) and Color Me Barbra (1966) were extremely successful.
After a brief London stage period and the birth of her son Jason Gould (with then-husband Elliott Gould), in summer 1967 she gave a memorable free concert in New York City, "A Happening in Central Park", that was filmed and later broadcast (in an edited version) as a TV special; then she flew to Hollywood for her first movie, Funny Girl (1968), a filming of her stage success. The picture, directed by William Wyler, opened in 1968 and became a hit in the US and abroad, making her an international "superstar" and multiple award winner, including the Best Actress Oscar. After a series of screen musicals, such as Gene Kelly's Hello, Dolly! (1969) and Vincente Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), she wanted to try comedies, resulting in such films as The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) and What's Up, Doc? (1972). She turned to dramas and turned out Up the Sandbox (1972) and the classic The Way We Were (1973), directed by Sydney Pollack and co-starring Robert Redford. The song "The Way We Were" (written by Marvin Hamlisch and Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman) became one of her biggest hits and most memorable and famous songs.
She returned to TV for a new special conceived as a musical journey covering many world musical styles, Barbra Streisand and Other Musical Instruments (1973), then returned (for contractual reasons) to her Fanny Brice role in a sequel to her hit "Funny Girl" film, Funny Lady (1975), and the next year turned out one of her most personal film projects, A Star Is Born (1976), one of the biggest hits of the year for which she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress and her second Oscar, for the song "Evergreen". Always extremely busy on the discography side, averaging one album a year throughout the '70s and '80s, she had a string of successful singles and albums, such as "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" (duet with Neil Diamond), "Enough is Enough" (with Donna Summer), "The Main Event" (from her film The Main Event (1979) with her friend Ryan O'Neal) and the album "Guilty", written for her by The Bee Gees' Barry Gibb, which sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
She debuted as a director with the musical drama Yentl (1983), in which she also portrayed a Jewish girl who is forced to pass herself off as a man to pursue her dreams. The movie received generally positive reviews and the beautiful score by Michel Legrand and lyricists Marilyn Bergman and Alan Bergman stands up as one of Streisand's finest musical works. The film received several Oscar nominations, winning in two categories, but she was not nominated as Best Director, which disappointed both her and her fans, many of whom consider this the Academy's biggest "snub".
In 1985 her album "The Broadway Album" was an unexpected runaway success, winning a Grammy Award and helping to introduce a new generation to the world of American musical theater. In 1986 she performed in a memorable concert, after 19 years of stage silence, "One Voice". She returned to the screen in Nuts (1987), a drama directed by Martin Ritt, in the role of a prostitute accused of murder who fights to avoid being labeled "insane" at her trial. In 1991 she appeared in The Prince of Tides (1991), which many consider to be the pinnacle of her screen career, playing a psychiatrist who tries to help a man (Nick Nolte) to find the pieces of his past life. The film received seven Oscar nominations (but again NOT for Best Directing), but she did receive a nomination from the DGA (Directors Guild of America) for Best Director. In 1994 she returned to the stage after 27 years for a series of sold-out concerts (for the televised version of one of these, she won another Emmy).
In the 1990s she broke several personal records: with two #1 albums ("Back to Broadway" in 1993 and "Higher Ground" in 1997) and became the only artist to achieve a #1 album on the Billboard charts in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (she extended this record into the 21st century in 2009 with the jazz album "Love is the Answer"). In 1996 she starred in her third picture as director, The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), with Jeff Bridges and Lauren Bacall. The film had a "the girl got the guy" ending, and the same happened to her in real life--the next year she married well known TV actor James Brolin.
In 2000 she focused her career again on concerts ("Timeless") and in 2006-07 with a European tour. She made only two more films--a supporting role as a sex therapist mother in the Ben Stiller comedy Meet the Fockers (2004) and its sequel, Little Fockers (2010), alongside Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. She published a book, "Passion for Design", in 2010 and celebrated her friendship with the Bergmans with an entire album of their songs, "What Matters Most" (2011), that debuted in the top 10.
After a long break from filming, she returned in a starring role for the 2012 holiday season with The Guilt Trip (2012), a mother/son picture co-starring Seth Rogen and directed by Anne Fletcher, and is working on putting together a film version of the well-known Jule Styne musical "Gypsy". In almost 50 years of career, Streisand has contributed to the show business industry in a personal and unique way, collecting a multi-generational fan base; she has a powerful and recognize vocal range, and a raucous and often self-deprecating sense of humor, which doesn't prevent her from showing the serious and dramatic sides of her personality. Her strong political belief in social justice infuses her professional career and personal life, and she makes no bones about what she believes; her willingness to put her money where her mouth is has resulted in some truly vicious attacks by many who hold opposite political views, but that hasn't stopped her from acting on her beliefs. She has been honored with the Humanitarian Award from the Human Rights Campaign, an Honorary Doctorate in Arts and Humanities from Brandeis University in 1995, an Honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2013 and the bestowing by the government of France the title of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. She supports many humanitarian causes through the Streisand Foundation and has been a dedicated environmentalist for many years; she endowed a chair in environmental studies in 1987 and donated her 24-acre estate to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. In addition, she was the lead founder for the Clinton Climate Change Initiative. This effort brought together a consortium of major cities around the world to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. She is a leading spokesperson and fund-raiser for social and political causes close to her heart and has often dedicated proceeds from her live concert performances to benefit programs she supports.- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
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Binka Zhelyazkova was born on July 15, 1923 in the town of Svilengrad, Bulgaria. She studied theater at the National Theater Institute in Sofia. Her career as a film director began in 1957 when she co-directed her first feature film Life Goes Quietly By... with her husband Hristo Ganev.
At the end of the 1950s Binka Zhelyazkova was one of the few women in the world making feature films. Her style was influenced by Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave, as well as Russian Cinema.
During her career she directed seven feature and two documentary films. Four of her nine films were banned from distribution and reached audiences only after the end of communism. She was the director of the Bulgarian section of Women in Film, an organization created in 1989 after the international women in film conference, KIWI, in Tbilisi, Georgia. She stopped making films after 1989, which coincided with the fall of the communist regime in Bulgaria. For some time after that she remained active in the women in film organization but soon completely withdrew from public life.- Director
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Carla Simón was born on 22 December 1986 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. She is a director and writer, known for Alcarràs (2022), Summer 1993 (2017) and Letter to My Mother for My Son (2022).- Editorial Department
Celia Rico is known for La stella dei re (2007).- Writer
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Céline Sciamma was born on 12 November 1978 in Pontoise, Val-d'Oise, France. She is a writer and director, known for Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Petite Maman (2021) and Tomboy (2011).Una de mis favoritas.- Director
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Chantal Akerman was born on 6 June 1950 in Brussels, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for The Meetings of Anna (1978), I, You, He, She (1974) and A Couch in New York (1996). She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton. She died on 5 October 2015 in Paris, France.Una de las grandes.- Director
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The films of Claire Denis frequently explore the fragile connections between people and the ways in which the most seemingly inconsequential relationship can have life-changing effects. At the heart of Denis' cinema is a fascination with the delights and difficulties of belonging and otherness, the gravity and gift of foreignness. Often revolving around reactions to the intrusion of the other, be it a stranger or foreigner, Denis' films insist on the vital necessity of the unusual to coexist within the "normal" world. In films such as I Can't Sleep (1994) and Nénette and Boni (1996), Denis captures the mercurial and instant shifts in tone, from the pleasurably sensual to the menacing or the simply unaccountable, caused by the intrusion of the strange into the fabric of the everyday. In Denis' films one often feels that all is well even as worlds collide and collapse or, conversely, that a grave challenge underlies the seemingly calm moments. While Denis' childhood in French colonial Africa is reflected most directly in the African setting shared by her debut feature Chocolat (1988) and best-known film, Beau Travail (1999), this encounter with the intimacies and injustices of colonialism resounds throughout much of her work. Also shaping Denis' unique vision are the apprenticeships she served, just out of film school, under a variety of renowned directors, including Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, Dusan Makavejev and Jim Jarmusch - an eclectic company that is itself suggestive of the unique juxtaposition of careful craft and seeming casualness within Denis' work. Denis has often spoken of her shock as a young woman at discovering the novels of Faulkner that have exerted such a major influence over postwar French cinema. For Denis, Faulkner "was a plunge into the senses, into terror and the pain of his characters." These words describe Denis' films as well. But whatever terror and pain her characters may sometimes experience is outmeasured by the depths of Denis' deep affection for them and by her curiosity in their experiences of pleasure as well as fear. Even in the unsettling Trouble Every Day (2001), the not-infrequent catastrophes in Denis' films provoke a sense of wonder at, and even delight in, the sheer weight of existence.Beau travail, High life, 35 rhums, White material, etc. Una de las mejores.- Writer
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Clare Peploe was born on 20 October 1941 in Tanga, Tanganyika, British East Africa (now Tanga, Tanzania). She was a writer and director, known for High Season (1987), The Triumph of Love (2001) and Rough Magic (1995). She was married to Bernardo Bertolucci. She died on 24 June 2021 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.- Director
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Claudia Llosa was born on 15 November 1976 in Lima, Peru. She is a director and writer, known for The Milk of Sorrow (2009), Madeinusa (2006) and Loxoro (2012).- Actress
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Coline Serreau was born on 29 October 1947 in Paris, France. She is an actress and writer, known for Three Men and a Cradle (1985), Why Not! (1977) and Chaos (2001). She was previously married to Benno Besson.- Director
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Danièle Huillet was born on 1 May 1936 in Paris, France. She was a director and editor, known for Sicily! (1999), Class Relations (1984) and The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968). She was married to Jean-Marie Straub. She died on 9 October 2006 in Cholet, Maine-et-Loire, France.Un clásico.- Writer
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Danièle Thompson was born on 3 January 1942 in Monaco. She is a writer and director, known for The Log (1999), Orchestra Seats (2006) and Queen Margot (1994). She is married to Albert Koski. She was previously married to Richard Thompson.- Writer
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Dörrie completed her schooling at a humanistic high school, from which she graduated in 1973 with her Abitur. In the same year he spent two years in the USA. There she studied film and acting at the Drama Department at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. This was followed by studies at the New School of Social Research in New York. She also worked in cafés and as a projectionist in the Goethe House in New York. In 1975 she returned to Germany. She then studied at the University of Television and Film in Munich. At the same time, she worked as a film critic journalist for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Her final film is entitled "The First Waltz" and was broadcast on Bavarian television as "Max and Sandie". Doris Dörrie made various documentaries until 1982. In 1983 she made her first feature film in Munich called "Mitten ins Herz". Three years later she had a cinema hit with the title "Men". The well-known actors Uwe Ochsenknecht and Heiner Lauterbach star in the chaotic relationship comedy. The play became the most successful German film of 1986. Doris Dörrie was married to Helge Weindler from 1988 to 1996. Their daughter Carla was born in 1990.
In 1991 she had another cinema success with the title "Happy Birthday, Turk". She filmed the novel by the German writer Jakob Arjouni, a novel in the Kayankaya series. The witty film is in the tradition of classic detective films and tells the story of the search for a missing person in the Frankfurt milieu. The Turkish private detective Kayankaya, played by Hansa Czypionka, experiences police corruption. In 1994, Doris Dörrie shot the comedy film "Nobody Loves Me" with Maria Schrader. This production is about personal happiness. The work was honored with the silver film ribbon, the leading actress Maria Schrader with the gold film ribbon.
Her other film works include "No Trace of Romanticism" from 1980, "Between" from 1981, "Love in Germany" from 1989 and "Enlightenment Guaranteed" from 1999. Among all her film works The director also wrote the script herself. The films were often cast with well-known actors such as Senta Berger, Gottfried John or Uwe Ochsenknecht. She also shot the documentary entitled "What can it be?" In addition to her role behind the camera, she also performed guest roles in front of the camera. For example, she played in the film "The Leading Man" from 1977 or in "King Kong's Fist" and in "Back to Go" from 2000.
In addition to her film work, Doris Dörrie realized literary projects. This is how the short stories entitled "Love, Pain and All the Damned Stuff" and "What Do You Want from Me?" were created. She also wrote the short story "The Man of My Dreams" and the novel "What Do We Do Now?" In 1991 her collection of short stories entitled "Forever and Ever" was created. The 300-page work was well received by critics. In 2002 her film work entitled "Naked" and her novel "Happy" followed. In 2005 she staged Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Rigoletto" at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich under the musical direction of Zubin Mehta.
In the same year, 2005, she directed Giacomo Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" at the Gärtnerplatztheater. At the Salzburg Festival in 2006 she staged Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "La finta Giardiniera".Autora de Cerezos en flor y Recuerdos desde Fukushima.- Director
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Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director during the "Golden Age" of Hollywood's studio system--from the 1920s to the early 1940s and the woman director with the largest oeuvre in Hollywood to this day--was born January 3, 1897 (some sources put the year as 1900), in San Francisco, California, to a German-American father and a Scottish mother. Raised in Los Angeles, her parents ran a café which featured German cuisine and which was frequented by silent film stars including: Charles Chaplin and William S. Hart, and director Erich von Stroheim. She worked as a waitress at the restaurant, and no one could have foreseen at the time that Arzner would be one of the few women to break the glass ceiling of directing and would be the only woman to work during the early sound era.
In her 15-year career as a director (1928-43), Arzner made three silent movies and 14 "talkies". Her path to the director's chair was different than that of women directors in the future (indeed, different than most male directors too). Directors nowadays are typically graduates of film schools or were working actors prior to directing. Like most of the directors of her generation, Arzner gained wide training in most aspects of filmmaking by working her way up from the bottom. It was the best way to become a filmmaker, she later said.
After graduating from high school in 1915, she entered the University of Southern California, where she was in the pre-med program for two years. When the US entered World War I in 1917, Arzner was unable to realize her ambition of serving her country in a military capacity, as there were no women's units in the armed forces at the time, so she served as an ambulance driver during the war.
After the cessation of hostilities, Azner got a job on a newspaper. The director of her ambulance unit introduced her to film director William C. de Mille (the brother of Cecil B. DeMille, one of the co-founders of Famous Players-Lasky, which eventually became known by the title of its distribution unit--Paramount Pictures). She decided to pursue a film career after visiting a movie set and being intrigued by the editing facilities. Arzner decided that she would like to become a director (there was no strict delineation between directors and editors in the immediate postwar period as the movie studios matured into a "factory" industrial production paradigm).
Though she was the sole member of her gender to direct Hollywood pictures during the first generation of sound film, in the silent era a woman behind the camera was not unknown. The first movie in history was directed by a Frenchwoman, and many women were employed in Hollywood during the silent era, most frequently as scenario writers (some research indicates that as many as three-quarters of the scenario writers during the silent era--when there was no requirement for a screenplay as such as there was no dialogue--were women). Indeed, there were women directors in the silent era, such as Frances Marion (though she was more famous as a screenwriter) and Lois Weber, but Arzner was fated to be the only female director to have made a successful transition to "talkies". It wasn't until the 1930s and the verticalization of the industry, as it matured and consolidated, that women were squeezed out of production jobs in Hollywood.
The introduction to William deMille paid off when he hired her for the sum of $20 a week to be a stenographer. Her first job for DeMille was typing up scripts at Famous Players-Lasky. She was reportedly a poor typist. Ambitious and possessed of a strong will, Arzner offered to write synopses of various literary properties, and eventually was hired as a writer. Impressing DeMille and other Paramount powers-that-be, Arzner was assigned to Paramount's subsidiary Realart Films, as a film cutter. She was promoted to script girl after one year, which required her presence on the set to ensure the continuity of the script as shot by the director. She then was given a job editing films. She excelled at cutting: as an editor (she was the first Hollywood editor professionally credited as such on-screen), she labored on 52 films, working her way up from cutting Bebe Daniels comedies to assignments on "A" pictures within a couple of years. She came into her own as a filmmaker editing the Rudolph Valentino headliner Blood and Sand (1922), about a toreador. Her editing of the bullfighting scenes was highly praised, and she later said that she actually helmed the second-unit crew shooting some of the bullfight sequences. Director James Cruze was so impressed by her work on the Valentino picture that he brought her on to his team to edit The Covered Wagon (1923). Arzner eventually edited three other Cruze films: Ruggles of Red Gap (1923), Merton of the Movies (1924) and Old Ironsides (1926). Her work was of such quality that she received official screen credit as an editor, a first for a cutter of either gender.
While collaborating with Cruze she also wrote scenarios, scripting her ideas both solo and in collaboration. She was credited as a screenwriter (as well as an editor) on "Old Ironsides", one of the more spectacular films of the late silent era, being partially shot in Magnascope, one of the earliest widescreen processes. She would always credit Cruze as her mentor and role model. "Old Ironsides" proved to be the last film on which she was credited as an editor, as her ambitions to become a director would finally come to fruition. To indulge her, Paramount gave her a job as an assistant director, for which she was happy--until she realized it was not a stepping stone to the director's chair, and she was determined to sit in that chair.
Arzner pressured Paramount to let her direct, threatening to leave the studio to work for Columbia Pictures on Poverty Row, which had offered her a job as a director. Unwilling to lose such a talented filmmaker, the Paramount brass relented, and she made her debut with Fashions for Women (1927). It was a hit. In the process of directing Paramount's first talkie, Manhattan Cocktail (1928), she made history by becoming the first woman to direct a sound picture. The success of her next sound picture, The Wild Party (1929), starring Paramount's top star, Clara Bow, helped establish Fredric March as a movie star.
Arzner proved adept at handling actresses. As Budd Schulberg related in his autobiography "Moving Pictures", Clara Bow--a favorite of his father, studio boss B.P. Schulberg--had a thick Brooklyn accent that the silence of the pre-talkie era hid nicely from the audience. She was terrified of the transition to sound, and developed a fear of the microphone. Working with her sound crew, Arzner devised and used the first boom mike, attaching the microphone to a fish pole to follow Bow as she moved around the set. Arzner even used Bow's less-than-dulcet speaking tones to underscore the vivaciousness of her character.
Though Arzner made several successful films for Paramount, the studio teetered on the edge of bankruptcy due to the Depression, eventually going into receivership (before being saved by the advent of another iconic woman, Mae West). When the studio mandated a pay cut for all employees, Arzner decided to go freelance. RKO Radio Pictures hired her to direct its new star, headstrong young Katharine Hepburn, in her second starring film, Christopher Strong (1933). It was not a happy collaboration, as both women were strong and unyielding, but Arzner eventually prevailed. She was, after all, the boss on the set: The director. The fiercely independent Hepburn complained to RKO, but the studio backed its director against its star. Eventually the two settled into a working relationship, respecting each other but remaining cold and distant from one another. Ironically, Arzner would display her directorial flair in elucidating the kind of competitive rivalries between women she experienced with Hepburn.
The Directors Guild of America was established in 1933, and Arzner became the first woman member. Indeed, she was the only female member of the DGA for many years.
Arzner's films featured well-developed female characters, and she was known at the time of her work, quite naturally, as a director of "women's pictures". Not only did her movies portray the lives of strong, interesting women, but her pictures are noted for showcasing the ambiguities of life. Since the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1960s, Arzner's movies have been seen as challenging the dominant, phallocentric mores of the times.
Arzner was a lesbian, who cultivated a masculine look in her clothes and appearance (some feel as camouflage to hide the boy's club that was Hollywood). Many gay critics discern a hidden gay subtext in her films, such as "Christopher Strong". Whereas feminist critics see a critique of gender inequality in "Christopher Strong", lesbian critics see a critique of heterosexuality itself as the source of a woman's troubles. The very private Azner, the woman who broke the glass ceiling and had to survive, and indeed thrived, in the all-male world of studio filmmaking, refused to be categorized as a woman or gay director, insisting she was simply a "director." She was right.
Arzner did have less troubled and more productive collaborations with other actresses after her experience with Hepburn. She developed a close friendship with one of her female stars, Joan Crawford, whom she directed in two 1937 MGM vehicles, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937) and The Bride Wore Red (1937). Arzner later directed Pepsi commercials as a favor to Crawford's husband, Pepsi-Cola Company's Chairman of the Board Alfred Steele.
In 1943 Arzner joined other top Hollywood directors such as John Ford and George Stevens in going to work for the war effort during World War Two. She made training films for the US Army's Women's Army Corps (WACs). That same year her health was compromised after she contracted pneumonia. After the war she did not return to feature film directing, but made documentaries and commercials for the new television industry. She also became a filmmaking teacher, first at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1950s and 1960s and then at the University of California-Los Angeles campus during the 1960s and 1970s. At UCLA she taught directing and screenwriting, and one of her students was Francis Ford Coppola, the first film school grad to achieve major success as a director. She taught at UCLA until her death in 1979.
She was honored in her own lifetime, becoming a symbol and role model for women filmmakers who desired entry into mainstream cinema. The feminist movement in the 1960s championed her. In 1972 the First International Festival of Women's Films honored her by screening "The Wild Party", and her oeuvre was given a full retrospective at the Second Festival in 1976. In 1975 the DGA honored her with "A Tribute to Dorothy Arzner." During the tribute, a telegram from Katharine Hepburn was read: "Isn't it wonderful that you've had such a great career, when you had no right to have a career at all?"- Writer
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Dunia Ayaso was born in 1961 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain. She was a writer and director, known for The Island Inside (2009), El grito en el cielo (1998) and Descongélate! (2003). She died on 28 February 2014 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.- Director
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Elena Trapé was born in 1976 in Barcelona, Spain. She is a director and writer, known for The Distances (2018), Els encantats (2023) and Blog (2010).- Elena Jordi is known for La loca del monasterio (1916).
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Esfir Shub was born into a family of landowners. She studied literature in Moscow, but after Revolution she began to attend the classes at the Institute for Women's Higher Education and then got a job as a 'theater officer' at the State Commissariat of Education. In the theatre she worked in collaboration with the famous avant-garde director Meyerhold and the poet Mayakovsky, who was one of her friends.
Shub joined the Goskino film company and met Dziga Vertov. Their professional friendship was lifelong, but stormy. Shub shared his belief in film's intrinsic ability to reveal aspects of reality not visible to the naked eye, but she became engaged more in the interpretation of the historical world than in only contemporary matters.
First Shub worked as a re-editor of foreign films for Soviet distribution. In 1927 (the tenth anniversary of Revolution) she made her first documentary film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). This film was the first part of the trilogy, which also consists of The Great Road (1927) and Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicolai II (1928). In the process of making the trilogy, Shub had to contend with not only an overwhelming volume of material but also the problem of locating relevant footage. She often found that valuable documents of the pre-war period had been sold abroad or had been badly damaged in ill-equipped newsreel archives. Shub compensated the lack of material by using newly shot footage. Her films derive much of their power from this technique of providing a contemporary context for archival footage. Thus, Shub created the absolutely new genre 'historical compilation film'. She later claimed she just wanted to create 'editorialized newsreels'.
The critics and colleagues admired Shub's work, because she found a middle path between narrative and documentary forms. Sovkino denied her authorial rights for her trilogy claiming that she was just an editor. However, in 1935 Shub was awarded the title Honored Artist of the Republic.
In the beginning of the forties she collaborated with Vsevolod Pudovkin on the successful Twenty Years of Soviet Cinema (1940). Then she left Goskino to become chief editor of the 'News of the Day' at the central studio for documentary film in Moscow. Most of her later years were confined to editing duties. Shub was definitely the most prominent Soviet woman filmmaker of her generation.- Editor
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Farugh Farrokhzad was primarily a poet. Indeed, she is regarded as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century in Iran, which has a millennium of poetic tradition behind it. Although she only made one film, the 22 minute so-called documentary "The House is Black", this work is generally seen as the crucial precursor of the Iranian New Wave.Poeta iraní y directora de corta trayectoria cuyo título más notable es el del corto La casa es negra.- Director
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The daughter of a cavalry captain, she was raised by a grandmother in Paris, where she studied various forms of art with an emphasis on music and the opera. In 1905 she married engineer-novelist Marie-Louis Albert-Dulac and under his influence veered toward journalism. As one of the leading radical feminists of her day, she was editor of La Française, the organ of the French suffragette movement. She also doubled as theater and cinema critic of the publication and became increasingly enamored with film as an art form. In 1915 she formed, with her husband, a small production company, Delia Film, and began directing highly inventive, small-budget pictures. Chronologically, she was the second woman director in French films, after Alice Guy, a contemporary of Georges Méliès. With La fête espagnole (1920) and her masterpiece, _Souriante Madame Beudet, La (1922)_, Dulac emerged as a leading figure in the impressionist movement in French films. In the late 20s, she was an important part of the "second avant-garde" of the French cinema with the surrealistic _Coquille et le Clergyman, La (1927)_ and a number of other experimental films. In these as well as in her theoretical writing, her goal was "pure" cinema, free from any influence from literature, the stage, or even the other visual arts. She talked of "musically constructed" films, or "films made according to the rules of visual music." Dulac was also instrumental in the development of cinema clubs throughout France in the mid-20s. Sound put an end to her experimentations and her career as a director. From 1930 until her death she was in charge of newsreel production at Pathé, then at Gaumont.- Director
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Gillian Armstrong was born on 18 December 1950 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is a director and producer, known for My Brilliant Career (1979), Not Fourteen Again (1996) and Little Women (1994). She is married to John Pleffer. They have two children.La directora de la versión de Mujercitas con Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon y Kirsten Dunst.- Director
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Gracia Querejeta was born on 13 August 1962 in Madrid, Spain. She is a director and writer, known for Siete mesas de billar francés (2007), 15 Years and One Day (2013) and Cuando vuelvas a mi lado (1999).- Actress
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Greta Gerwig is an American actress, playwright, screenwriter, and director. She has collaborated with Noah Baumbach on several films, including Greenberg (2010), Frances Ha (2012), for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination, and Mistress America (2015). Gerwig made her solo directorial debut with the critically acclaimed comedy-drama film Lady Bird (2017), which she also wrote, and has also had starring roles in the films Damsels in Distress (2011), Jackie (2016), and 20th Century Women (2016).
Greta Celeste Gerwig was born in Sacramento, California, to Christine Gerwig (née Sauer), a nurse, and Gordon Gerwig, a financial consultant and computer programmer. She has German, Irish, and English ancestry. Gerwig was raised as a Unitarian Universalist, but also attended an all-girls Catholic school. She has described herself as "an intense child". With an early interest in dance, she intended to get a degree in musical theatre in New York. She graduated from Barnard College in NY, where she studied English and philosophy, instead. Originally intending to become a playwright, after meeting young film director Joe Swanberg, she became the star of a series of intellectual low budget movies made by first-time filmmakers, a trend dubbed "mumblecore".
Gerwig was cast in a minor role in Swanberg's LOL (2006) in 2006, while still studying at Barnard. She then appeared in many of Swanberg's films, and personally co-directed, co-wrote and co-produced one entitled Nights and Weekends (2008). She has worked with good quality directors such as Ti West (The House of the Devil (2009)), Whit Stillman (Damsels in Distress (2011)), or Woody Allen (To Rome with Love (2012)) but success and (international) recognition did not come until Frances Ha (2012), directed by Noah Baumbach, a film she also co-wrote. Both tall and immature, awkward and graceful, blundering and candid, annoying and engaging, Greta has won all hearts in the title role of Frances Ha(liday).
In 2017, she wrote and directed the highly acclaimed, semi-autobiographical teen movie Lady Bird (2017), set in 2002-2003, and starring Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, and Timothée Chalamet.
In 2011, Gerwig received an award for Acting from the Athena Film Festival for her artistry as one of Hollywood's definitive screen actresses of her generation.La directora de Frances Ha, Lady bird y Greenberg.- Writer
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Gurinder Chadha was born in Kenya, and grew up in Southall, London, England. She began her career as a news reporter with BBC Radio, directed several award winning documentaries for the BBC, and began an alliance with the British Film Institute (BFI) and Channel Four. In 2001, Chadha set up her own production company: Bend It Films.La de Quiero ser como Beckham.- Director
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Haifaa Al Mansour is the first female filmmaker in Saudi Arabia and is regarded as one of the most significant cinematic figures in the Kingdom. She finished her bachelor's degree in Literature at the American University in Cairo and completed a Master's degree in Directing and Film Studies from the University of Sydney. The success of her three short films, as well as the international acclaim of her award-winning 2005 documentary Women Without Shadows, influenced a whole new wave of Saudi filmmakers and made the issue of opening cinemas in the Kingdom a front-page discussion. Within the Kingdom her work is both praised and vilified for encouraging discussion on topics generally considered too taboo, like tolerance, the dangers of orthodoxy, and the need for Saudis to take a critical look at their traditional and restrictive culture.Directora de Arabia Saudí cuyas principales obras son Nappily ever after, Mary Shelley y Wadjda.- Actress
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Helena Cortesina was born on 17 July 1903 in Valencia, Spain. She was an actress and director, known for Spanish Flower or the Bullfighter's Story (1923), The Unapproachable Woman (1921) and A sangre fría (1947). She died on 7 March 1984 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.- Director
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Hélène Cattet was born in 1976 in Paris, France. She is a director and writer, known for Amer (2009), The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013) and Let the Corpses Tan (2017).- Director
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Helke Sander was born on 31 January 1937 in Berlin, Germany. She is a director and writer, known for From the Reports of Security Guards & Patrol Services Part 1 (1985), Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe (1984) and Der subjektive Faktor (1981).- Actress
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Born in Madrid, Iciar Bollain has worked as an actress in films such El Sur (1983), directed by Víctor Erice; Sublet (1991) directed by Chus Gutiérrez, Malaventura (1988) directed by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón; El Mejor de los Tiempos (1990) and Un Paraguas para Tres (1992) directed by Felipe Vega, Tierra y Libertad (1995) directed by Ken Loach, LEO (2000) directed by Jose Luis Borau, Nos Miran (2002) directed by Norberto Pérez, La Balsa de Piedra (2003) directed by Geogre Sluiezer and La Noche del Hermano (2005) directed by Santiago García de Leániz. As a director, Icíar has written and directed many renowned films. Flowers from Another World, her second film, was awarded at Cannes Film Festival in 1999 (Best Film in the International Critics' Week). Take my eyes (2003), her following film as writer and director, won 7 Goyas (Spanish Academy Awards), including Best Film, among many other international awards. She directed a script by Paul Laverty in 2009, Even the Rain. The film obtained national and international recognition: 13 nominations to the Goya Awards, Panorama Award at the Berlinale, Ariel Award to best Latin-American film and it was in the short list of the foreign films selected for the Academy Awards in 2010 representing Spain. In 2011 she directed and co-wrote Katmandú, un Espejo en el Cielo. The film was nominated to the Goya Awads in the categories of Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2014 it was released En Tierra Extraña, a documentary that Iciar directed about the life of young Spanish immigrants in Edinburgh, Scotland, who had to leave Spain due to recession and unemployment Iciar Bollain is currently in pre-production of his next film, The Olive Tree, a new collaboration with the writer Paul Laverty and Morena Films. The film will start principal photography in May 2015.- Director
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Ildikó Enyedi was born on 15 November 1955 in Budapest, Hungary. She is a director and writer, known for On Body and Soul (2017), Simon, the Magician (1999) and My Twentieth Century (1989).- Director
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Isabel Coixet was born on 9 April 1960 in Sant Adrià de Besòs, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. She is a director and writer, known for My Life Without Me (2003), The Secret Life of Words (2005) and The Bookshop (2017).- Director
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At the time when women directors make more and more their presence felt on the French scene, the importance of Jacqueline Audry cannot be overstated. All today's daring Metteuses En Scene are certainly her psychic daughters as they are Agnès Varda's. Audry, born in 1908, began to direct long before Varda, as contemporary of Ida Lupino in America. Audry's movies mostly dealt with female psychology from every angle. Her first effort was a subversive adaptation of La Comtesse De Ségur's "Les Malheurs De Sophie" (1946), the young heroine refused the aristocratic happiness and eventually took a rebel stand. "Gigi" (1948) (remade by Vincente Minnelli as a musical) and "Minne" (1950), both from Colette's novels, featured Danielle Delorme. But it was the overlooked "Olivia" (1951) which revealed Audry's remarkable talent: in a boarding-school for girls, two female teachers vied with each other for their students love; using literary works to enhance her story, helped by Edwige Feuillère's masterful performance, this Audry's tour De force about lesbianism was far ahead of its time. "Huis clos" (1954) from Sartre was her second great achievement: the beginning (the elevator) might have inspired Alan Parker for "Angel Heart", using flashbacks to avoid filmed stage production style, Audry's directing is dazzling, with an excellent cast featuring glorious Arletty as lesbian Inès. 'La Garçonne", a remake of a thirties movie which surpassed its model, introduced a woman who would want to live like a man, it contained scenes which, at the time, were more scandalous than what Roger Vadim was doing with Brigitte Bardot. Sadly, another remake, "L'Ecole Des Cocottes" (1958) ,could not hold a candle to the thirties version featuring Raimu. Her last worthwhile effort was "Le Secret Du Chevalier D'Eon" (1960), the fictionalized story of Louis The Fifteenth's spy who used to dress up as a woman: this film and "La Garçonne" featured Andrée Debar, whose androgynous looks worked wonders. A road movie ("Les Petits Matins",1961) and other indifferent movies in the sixties and Audry's career closed in 1971. She died in 1977, and she had unfairly sunk into oblivion. She was married to screenwriter Pierre Laroche who would work with her.- Writer
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Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and now lives in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Having graduated with a BA in Anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, and a BA, with a painting major, at Sydney College of the Arts in 1979, she began filmmaking in the early 1980s, attending the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). Her first short film, Peel (1982) won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. Her other short films include A Girl's Own Story (1984), Passionless Moments (1983), After Hours (1985) and the tele-feature 2 Friends (1986), all of which won Australian and international awards. She co-wrote and directed her first feature film, Sweetie (1989), which won the Georges Sadoul prize in 1989 for Best Foreign Film, as well as the LA Film Critics' New Generation Award in 1990, the American Independant Spirit Award for Best Foreign Feature, and the Australian Critics' Award for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress. She followed this with An Angel at My Table (1990), a dramatization based on the autobiographies of Janet Frame which won some seven prizes, including the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1990. It was also awarded prizes at the Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals, again winning the American Independent Spirit Award, and was voted the most popular film at the 1990 Sydney Film Festival. The Piano (1993) won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, making her the first woman ever to win the prestigious award. She also captured an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 1993 Oscars, while also being nominated for Best Director.- Producer
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Jennifer Lee was born on 22 October 1971 in Barrington, Rhode Island, USA. She is a producer and writer, known for Frozen (2013), Frozen II (2019) and Wreck-It Ralph (2012). She has been married to Alfred Molina since August 2021. She was previously married to Robert Joseph Monn.Peliculitas de Frozen.- Producer
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Leni Riefenstahl's show-biz experience began with an experiment: she wanted to know what it felt like to dance on the stage. Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures. With Fanck as her mentor, Riefenstahl began directing films.
Her penchant for artistic work earned her acclaim and awards for her films across Europe. It was her work on Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary commissioned by the Nazi government about Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, that would come back to haunt her after the atrocities of World War II. Despite her protests to the contrary, Riefenstahl was considered an intricate part of the Third Reich's propaganda machine. Condemned by the international community, she did not make another movie for over 50 years.La nazi.- Director
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Jessica Hausner was born on 6 October 1972 in Vienna, Austria. She is a director and writer, known for Little Joe (2019), Lourdes (2009) and Amour Fou (2014).- Director
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Jocelyn Moorhouse was born on 4 September 1960 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is a director and writer, known for The Dressmaker (2015), Proof (1991) and Muriel's Wedding (1994). She is married to P.J. Hogan.- Actress
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Jodie Foster started her career at the age of two. For four years she made commercials and finally gave her debut as an actress in the TV series Mayberry R.F.D. (1968). In 1975 Jodie was offered the role of prostitute Iris Steensma in the movie Taxi Driver (1976). This role, for which she received an Academy Award nomination in the "Best Supporting Actress" category, marked a breakthrough in her career. In 1980 she graduated as the best of her class from the College Lycée Français and began to study English Literature at Yale University, from where she graduated magna cum laude in 1985. One tragic moment in her life was March 30th, 1981 when John Warnock Hinkley Jr. attempted to assassinate the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. Hinkley was obsessed with Jodie and the movie Taxi Driver (1976), in which Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, tried to shoot presidential candidate Palantine. Despite the fact that Jodie never took acting lessons, she received two Oscars before she was thirty years of age. She received her first award for her part as Sarah Tobias in The Accused (1988) and the second one for her performance as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).- Producer
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Joy Batchelor was born on 22 May 1914 in Watford, Hertfordshire, England, UK. She was a producer and director, known for Animal Farm (1954), New Schools (1947) and Ruddigore (1966). She was married to John Halas. She died on 14 May 1991 in London, England, UK.- Director
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Julia Ducournau is a French film director and screenwriter. She attended film school at La Fémis in Paris, where she studied screenwriting. In 2011, her short film JUNIOR won the Petit Rail d'Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature, the horror movie Raw (2016), won the coveted FIPRESCI prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.La de Crudo.- Director
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Thirty-one years ago, filmmaker Julie Dash broke racial and gender boundaries with her Sundance award-winning film (Best Cinematography) Daughters of the Dust. She became the first African American woman to have a wide theatrical release of her feature film. The Library of Congress placed Daughters of the Dust and her UCLA MFA senior thesis Illusions in the National Film Registry. These two films join a select group of American films preserved and protected as national treasures by the Librarian of Congress. Dash recently designed two rooms for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and VOGUE, In American: An Anthology of Fashion, featured at the NYC Met Gala 2022.Directora afroamericana.- Actress
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Julie Delpy was born in Paris, France, in 1969 to Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, both actors.
She was first featured in Jean-Luc Godard's Detective (1985) at the age of fourteen. She has starred in many American and European productions since then, including Disney's The Three Musketeers (1993), Killing Zoe (1993), Three Colors: White (1994), and the "Before" series, alongside Ethan Hawke: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013).
She graduated from NYU's film school, and wrote and directed the short film Blah Blah Blah (1995), which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. She is a resident of Los Angeles.- Director
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Kelly Reichardt was born and raised in Miami-Dade Country, Florida, to a family of police officers. She had an interest in photography from a very young age. She started by using her father's camera, which he used for photographing crime scenes. She went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. In the summer of 2005, Reichardt directed Old Joy (2006), which premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. It was the first American film to win the Tiger award at the Rotterdam Film Festival and opened at the Film Forum in New York City. Reichardt's first feature, River of Grass (1994), a sun-drenched noir that was shot in her home town of Dade County, was cited as one of the best films of 1995 by the Boston Globe, Village Voice, Film Comment, the New York Daily News, Paper Magazine, and the San Francisco Guardian.- Actress
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Tanaka Kinuyo was a highly regarded and prolific actress best known for her films with director Mizoguchi Kenji. She was immersed in the world of film having received her start in the world of entertainment at age fourteen, being a filmmaker herself, being the cousin of director Kobayashi Masaki and, very much like Hara Setsuko and Ozu Yasujiro, being anecdotally romantically linked with the aforementioned Mizoguchi. The director would later recommend against her being hired as a director, which caused a rift between the two. She received her first known credit in Shochiku's Genroku Onna in 1924. She stayed to become the studio's biggest actress, and a paradigm of beauty, until approximately 1949 when she travelled to the United States Of America as an ambassador of Japanese culture. Upon her return from the US the Japanese detected a change of attitude in her, as well as noting a new short hairdo, which momentarily lead to some criticism. She had married director Shimizu Hiroshi, with whom she had worked, in 1929. Sources claim this was a mere cohabitation however. The marriage lasted a matter of months, but the two worked together beyond their romantic union. She married another one of her directors Gosho Heinosuke, but not before also starring in several Ozu films. It looked like films like Aizen Katsu and Naniwa Onna would be the height of her fame with all their popularity, but post-war films like Life Of Oharu, Sansho The Bailiff and Ugetsu were even bigger classics and immortalized the actress. Another of her many other noteworthy performances was in The Ballad Of Narayama based on a tradition and folklore of Japan. As if to complete her tour de force of Japanese cinema she directed several films and even worked with Kurosawa Akira in Red Beard. She died of a brain tumor in 1977.- Director
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Kira Muratova was born on 5 November 1934 in Soroca, Romania [now Moldova]. She was a director and writer, known for Nastroyshchik (2004), Vtorostepennye lyudi (2001) and The Asthenic Syndrome (1989). She was married to Aleksandr Muratov and Yevgeni Golubenko. She died on 6 June 2018 in Odessa, Ukraine.- Director
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Leontine Sagan was born on 13 February 1889 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]. She was a director and actress, known for Mädchen in Uniform (1931), Men of Tomorrow (1932) and Showtime (1946). She was married to Dr. Victor Fleischer (dramatist). She died on 20 May 1974 in Pretoria, South Africa.- Director
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Liliana Cavani was born on 12 January 1933 in Carpi, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. She is a director and writer, known for L'ospite (1971), Dove siete? Io sono qui (1993) and The Night Porter (1974).- Writer
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During the 1970s, Lina Wertmüller emblazoned her name into the pantheon of Italian cinema with a series of intensely polemical, deeply controversial and wonderfully entertaining films. Among the most politically outspoken and iconoclastic members of the second generation of postwar directors - the direct heirs to the neo-realists - Wertmüller was also one of the first woman directors to be internationally recognized and acclaimed. Armed with a keenly satiric and Rabelaisian humor, Wertmüller reinvented the narrative forms and character types of Italian comedy to create one of the rare examples of a radical, politically galvanized cinema that managed to achieve widespread popularity. Indeed, the fierce invectives against social, cultural and historical inequities at the heart of Wertmüller's mid-1970s masterworks Love and Anarchy, Seven Beauties and Swept Away seemed only to help the films find an appreciative audience, especially in the United States, where they broke box office records for foreign films and even secured Wertmüller an Oscar nomination for Best Director - the very first woman named for this category. Although Wertmüller remains a well-known name, her remarkable films are strangely overlooked and only selectively revisited. And yet, the incredible energy and daring of her most popular works is equally present in lesser-known masterpieces such as All Screwed Up and The Seduction of Mimi, films that are both extremely topical and yet still totally relevant today.- Actress
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Liv Ullmann's father was a Norwegian engineer who used to work abroad, so as a child she lived in Tokyo, Canada, New York and Oslo. In the mid-1950s she made her stage debut and in 1957 made her film debut. She really became successful, however, when she began to work for Swedish director Ingmar Bergman in such films as Persona (1966), The Passion of Anna (1969) and Face to Face (1976). She also had a successful film career away from Bergman (The Abdication (1974), Dangerous Moves (1984).- Writer
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Writer/director Lone Scherfig graduated from The National Film School of Denmark in 1984. Her first feature film, THE BIRTHDAY TRIP (1990), was selected for Panorama in Berlin, the New Directors section at MOMA in New York and won the Grand Jury Prix in Rouen. Her next film, ON OUR OWN (1998), received the Grand Prix in Montreal and the Cinekid Prize in Amsterdam. Scherfig then wrote and directed ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS (2000; the Danish 'Dogma' #5), which was a huge audience hit and won her the Silver Bear and the international film critics' award FIPRESCI at the 2001 Berlinale, plus numerous other awards around the world.
Scherfig's first English-language feature, WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF (2002), toured the festival circuit and brought home awards from e.g. France, the US and Japan. Her next production, AN EDUCATION (2009), won the Audience Award at Sundance and was nominated for three Oscars and eight BAFTAs. Scherfig has since directed three British films, i.e. ONE DAY (2011), THE RIOT CLUB (2014) and THEIR FINEST (2016) which premiered at TIFF in 2016 and screened in Sundance and London as the Mayor's gala. In 2019, Lone Scherfig's The Kindness of Strangers opened and was in competition at Berlin International Film Festival.
In between features Scherfig has directed a range of TV-series, including TAXA (1997), QUIET WATERS (1999), BETTER TIMES (2004) and, most recently, THE ASTRONAUT WIVES CLUB (2015; conceptualised by Scherfig).La de Italiano para principiantes y An education.- Writer
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Lucía Puenzo was born on 28 November 1976 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a writer and director, known for XXY (2007), The German Doctor (2013) and The Fish Child (2009).La de XXY.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Born in 1966 in Salta in the North of Argentina,Lucrecia Martel settled down in Buenos Aires where she attended the ENERC (National Film School). She started by directing a few shorts among which Historias Breves I: Rey muerto (1995), which garnered several awards in the international film festival circuit. From 1995 to 1998, she made a series of documentaries for TV as well as a children's TV programme, hailed by the Argentinian press for its unusual dark humor. From 2001 until today, Lucrecia Martel has managed to make three very personal feature films, The Swamp (2001), The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008), in which she explores her favorite theme, troubled minds.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Lynne Ramsay was born on 5 December 1969 in Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland, UK. She is a director and writer, known for You Were Never Really Here (2017), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and Ratcatcher (1999). She was previously married to Rory Stewart Kinnear.La de Tenemos que hablar de Kevin, En realidad nunca estuviste aquí, Ratcatcher, y Morvern Callar.- Director
- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
Mar Coll was born in 1981 in Barcelona, Spain. She is a director and writer, known for Tres dies amb la família (2009), We All Want What's Best for Her (2013) and La inquilina (2015).La de Todos queremos lo mejor para ella.- Producer
- Writer
- Director
Maren Ade was born in Karlsruhe on 12 December 1976 to a couple of teachers.She studied cinema at Munich's Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film. As of 2001 she co-founded, together with Janine Jackowski, a fellow graduate from HFF, the "Komplizen" film company. It is through Komplizen that Maren would later co-produce, among others, "Arabian Nights", Miguel Gomes' masterpiece. After two shorts in 2000 and 2001 made under the auspices of her film school, she co-produced, wrote and and directed Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen (2003), her first feature. A grueling drama about the difficult beginnings of a new teacher, the movie impressed both audiences and critics. Incidentally, it is of interest to specify that its school scenes were entirely shot within the walls of the educational institution where her mother was teaching at the time. This promising effort was followed six years later by Everyone Else (2009), which although taking place in a totally different setting (the Sardinian seaside in the glory of Summer) also concerns characters unsure of themselves. A taut drama as well, it revolves around two holiday making newly married couples and describes in a Roman Polanski-like manner the wicked relationships they share. But her greatest success came in 2015 and 2016 with Toni Erdmann (2016), an offbeat comedy with a philosophical approach, which enthused the festival-goers at Cannes, allegedly making them "roar with laughter", and later making unexpected profit in art houses throughout the world. And it is true that a father playing dirty tricks on his daughter (meant to make her realize she is wasting her life) is no ordinary entertainment. As a matter of fact, after only three full-length movies to her credit, Maren Ade has become a name that counts in today's German cinema.La de Toni Erdmann.- Actress
- Director
- Writer
Margarethe von Trotta was born in Berlin in 1942. In the 1960s she moved to Paris where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films. She also pursued an acclaimed acting career, starring in films by well known German directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Volker Schlöndorff. In 1971, von Trotta divorced her first husband Juergen Moeller (with whom she had a child) and married Schlöndorff. She co-wrote many of the scripts for his films, and in 1975 the two of them co-directed The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). In 1977, von Trotta directed her first solo feature The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978). With her third film, Marianne & Juliane (1981), von Trotta's position as New German Cinema's most prominent and successful female filmmaker was fully secured.
Her films feature strong female protagonists, and are usually set against an important political background. Themes in her work include the effect of the political on the personal, and vice versa, as well as the relationships between female characters, often sisters.No necesita presentación.- Actress
- Producer
- Director
Margarita Alexandre was born on 3 July 1923 in León, Castilla y León, Spain. She was an actress and producer, known for Cristo (1954), El Vaquero and the Girl (1956) and Terroristi a Madrid (1955). She died on 23 December 2015 in Madrid, Madrid, Spain.- Writer
- Director
- Actress
Ms. Duras was born in southern Vietnam and lost her father at age 4. The family savings of 20 years bought the family a small plot in Cambodia, but everything was lost in a single season's flooding. The disaster killed her mother as a result. After high school in Saigon, Ms. Duras left Indochina to study law in Paris. As a young woman, she worked as a secretary in France's Ministry of Colonies from 1935 to 1941, before becoming a writer. She wrote 34 novels from 1943 to 1993, and became an enduring part of Paris's intellectual elite. In addition to her writing, she also directed about 16 films. For the film India Song (1975), she won France's Cinema Academy Grand Prix. She claimed to have rescued French president François Mitterand during World War II, when he was a resistance fighter and remained a friend and unconditional campaigner. Her most noted novel is "L'Amant", the story of a girl, from a poor French family in Indochina, who becomes the mistress of a wealthy Indochinese notable's son.La misma.- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Writer
Maria Ripoll was born in 1964 in Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. She is a director and assistant director, known for Twice Upon a Yesterday (1998), Live Twice, Love Once (2019) and Traces of Sandalwood (2014).- Producer
- Director
- Actress
Marion Hänsel was born on 12 February 1949 in Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône, France. She was a producer and director, known for Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1995), Si le vent soulève les sables (2006) and The Quarry (1998). She died on 8 June 2020 in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Belgium.- Writer
- Actress
- Director
Marta Balletbò-Coll was born in 1960 in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. She is a writer and actress, known for Costa Brava (1995), Sévigné (2004) and Intrepidíssima (1996).