Women Make Features

This digital restoration of Claire Denis’ striking Beau Travail lends new crispness and intensity to not only one of the great films of the 1990s, but one of the greatest endings in all of cinema.

“Beautiful Thing telegraphed to its mid-1990s audiences something they hadn’t heard before: Gay people are just people.” —Brandon Tensley, The Atlantic

A Jehovah’s Witness wrestles with persecution and patriarchal confinement in this powerhouse debut from Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili.

A filmmaking couple navigate love, recognition and Ingmar Bergman in Mia Hansen-Løve's triple-layered Cannes darling, a serene and self-reflective ode to film and storytelling.

The 20 years Brief Encounters was banned by Soviet censors could not diminish the originality of this exquisite film, making it an instant classic.

A captivating journey into the early 80s moral panic of the “video nasty”, Prano Bailey-Bond’s audaciously meta retro-horror conjures the nightmare visions of David Lynch and Lucio Fulci.

“An impassioned film with an unflinching Indigenous and feminist perspective.” — Sarah Ward, Screendaily

French director Lucile Hadžihalilović creates an enigmatic and melancholic world that seems to exist in the centre of a Venn diagram of Lynch’s Eraserhead and Cronenberg’s Spider.

From Spanish creator Amalia Ulman, the darkly comedic El Planeta explores the relationship between a mother and daughter pair on the edge of financial ruin.

A soon-to-be-demolished social housing estate, named after Yuri Gagarin, in the Parisian banlieue provides the earthly anchor for weightless flights of fancy in this wondrous and moving debut feature.

Winner of the Golden Lion for Best Film at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival, Happening is a powerful and timely abortion drama, executed precisely by director Audrey Diwan.

An indomitable Kosovar woman defies entrenched patriarchal societal norms to ensure her family’s welfare in this subdued but spirited debut feature, inspired by a true story that scooped three top awards at Sundance 2021.

A young French-Algerian woman, Selma, navigates emerging sexual desires under the constraints of her family’s patriarchal notions of virginity, intimacy and womanhood in this empowering coming-of-age drama.

Documentarian Heidi Ewing turns to narrative feature filmmaking in this lilting, graceful love story about two Mexican men whose bond is tested by distance, homophobia and hostile immigration systems.

An archaeologist reluctantly agrees to test-run a humanoid love robot programmed to fulfil her desires in this poignant comedy starring Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens.

Caught between the inaction of local authorities and the senseless cruelty of the cartels, a Mexican mother takes matters into her own hands when her daughter is kidnapped in Teodora Ana Mihai’s fierce first feature.

Two strangers explore the pleasures and pitfalls of platonic friendship while bonding over online Spanish lessons in this intimate, expressive drama shot during lockdown over video-chat calls.

Sensual, subversive and sun-drenched, “even mothers make mistakes” (Peter Debruge, Variety) in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s glittering directorial debut, the 2021 Venice Film Festival winner for Best Screenplay.

A beautifully poignant and life-affirming fable, shared through the eyes of an optimistic dog as she looks back on the human companions she has loved throughout her life with happiness, heartbreak and everything between.

After missing her flight to a prestigious internship, an anxiety-ridden architecture grad fakes being in New York while lying low in her home town scrounging for another ticket.

Socialist pioneer Eleanor Marx is fully brought to life – with all her complexities and contradictions – in this stylised, lavish biopic featuring a deeply affecting performance by Romola Garai.

Railing against an oppressive, overbearing father, a teenage girl embraces independence and flirts with desire over the course of a formative weekend in this sunny, sinister Croatian drama.

A mysterious, unclassifiable semi-satire of its disconnected upper-classes, Poland’s selection for this year’s Oscar race follows an angelic masseuse trying to draw meaning out of his patients’ lives.

A nail-biting rescue thriller wrapped up in a chilling vision of near-dystopia, this Kiwi-Canadian co-production tackles Canada’s dark colonial roots through strong genre craft.

A young cartoonist is forced to grow up faster than she’d like when an unplanned pregnancy threatens to upset her party-heavy lifestyle in this subversive Norwegian comedy.

A refreshingly original, genre-hopping exploration of where our developing technologies might take us, that fuses offbeat humour anda lo-fi meets hi-tech vision of the world with moments of wry Herzogian philosophy.

A seven-year-old child becomes caught in a conflict of loyalty after her beloved brother falls victim to brutal schoolyard bullying.

Bella Cherry arrives in LA from Sweden ready to take the adult film world by storm, but the often-abusive, male-dominated industry presents its own unique pitfalls in Ninja Thyberg's feature debut.

Dame Jane Campion returns with her Venice Silver Lion-Best Director winner; a rich, menacing neo-Western tackling cowboy brothers and the mother and son who come between them.

When neurosurgeon Márta abandons a brilliant career to follow her lover to Budapest, she instead finds a man who claims they’ve never met. “A treat – sinewy, seductive and beautifully strange.” —The Guardian

This pressure-cooker Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film puts viewers on the frontlines of an impending massacre in the Bosnian genocide – with harrowing power.

A tonic for the nerves, Rosa’s Wedding is an uplifting and spirited ode to loving thyself, drenched in the dreamy seaside sunshine of the Costa del Azahar.

An infamous creepy tabloid story becomes a gleefully deranged examination of our conspiracy-ridden time in cult-favourite dirtbag podcaster Dasha Nekrasova’s debut feature.

Dizzying and captivating, Emma Seligman’s feature-length debut stars Rachel Sennott as a young woman who cannot escape her sugar daddy, her ex-girlfriend or her own lies at a family wake.

A breathtaking fable that follows a young woman’s quest to save her daughter’s soul from Limbo. One of the most impressive debut features of recent years, and a must-watch for fans of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (NZIFF 2019).

Bill Gosden championed countless New Zealand films during his tenure as Festival Director, and not all the obvious ones, either. Maybe it was its lust for Americana, the protagonist’s escape from southern parochialism (Bill grew up in Dunedin), or Gillian Ashurst’s darkly cartoonish take on Goodbye Pork Pie’s road movie legacy, that made him regard Snakeskin with such fondness.

Fascinated, he wrote, “I wouldn’t be surprised if, played backwards, it turns out to contain the solutions to every unsolved murder in the South Island”.

Writer/director Ayten Amin’s captivating second feature explores the entangled contradictions of living up to the expectations of God and family while balancing the desire for an Insta-worthy life in modern Egypt.

“Titane is coming, and it’s coming to fuck you up." — Jessica Kiang, The Playlist

The withering grip of the patriarchy pervades Kira Kovalenko's Cannes Un Certain Regard-winning tale of a young woman coming of age within a suffocating family in Russia’s desolate North Caucasus.

Borgen and Duke of Burgundy star Sidse Babett Knudsen is the imperious matriarch of a criminal empire in this fleet, brutal crime drama about bad luck and bad families from debut director Jeanette Nordahl.

“Y'all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It's kind of long but full of suspense.” — @_zolarmoon