- Nouchka van Brakel (1940) graduated in 1964 at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam. Since 1966 she has worked as director of features and documentaries often focusing on the position of women.
- She became the first woman to attend the Netherlands Film and Television Academy.
- She was the only student who owned a house, which quickly became a meeting place for student meetings as well as for Dolle Mina, a feminist organization founded in 1970.
- Her graduating class included very successful future directors and cameramen, including Adriaan Ditvoorst, Wim Verstappen, Robby Müller, and Jan de Bont.
- The movie, and A Woman Like Eve (1979), established her as an important Dutch feminist film director.
- Her fourth movie, Een Vrouw als Eva (A Woman Like Eve, 1979), starring Monique van de Ven and Maria Schneider as lesbian lovers, was a commercial success in the Netherlands, but the sexually explicit story of two women who fall in love at a feminist conference was not picked up in the United States, despite an enthusiastic endorsement by Shirley MacLaine.
- Her 1995 movie on Aletta Jacobs, Aletta Jacobs: Het Hoogste Streven, features the filmmaker herself as interviewing Jacobs's contemporaries. The movie was criticized for "imposing a Jewish atmosphere on the Jacobs family, for which there is no actual evidence.
- After 1987's Een maand later, her career seemed to falter.
- A recurring theme in her films is that of "women who break out of society's conventions and want something 'controversial'".
- Nouchka van Brakel was born in a socialist family which lived a fairly bohemian lifestyle: her mother was a singer and her father was a jazz musician, and they lived in Turkey for two years.
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