10 Fledgling Female Filmmakers
A Women's History Month special
Again, you wouldn’t know it from checking your Google calendars, but we’re in Women’s History Month (and marked International Women’s Day this past Saturday, March 8). It’s easy to use a month like this to champion current game-changers like Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Emerald Fennell, and Justine Triet or recognize trailblazers like Maya Deren, Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, and my beloved Nora Ephron.
But I think it’s just as important to shine a light where it’s needed the most: on female filmmakers whose careers still need that extra push in an industry that has not always been designed for their success. I’ve heard various statistics like the one cited in this New Yorker profile of Marielle Heller:
“She’d [Heller] been warned that it took women eight years on average to direct a second movie. And whereas men were handed the keys to a blockbuster after a single indie breakthrough, this rarely happened for women.”
This year, I challenge us all to hold competing truths in our heads. On the one hand, there’s great power being held by women at the top of the filmmaking business with directors such as Greta Gerwig and Chloé Zhao getting to take on some giant properties. On the other, it’s still far too difficult for women at the beginning of their careers to get the chances they need to prove themselves.
So with that in mind, I rounded up 10 movies by female directors who have made two features or less. Let this be a reminder to anyone in the business that much of the talent and diversity they seek is out there — they just need champions who believe in them.
The African Desperate by Martine Syms, MUBI
Within the modest means of her directorial debut, Martine Syms makes an impact with The African Desperate. While an easy and fun film to watch, this is a remarkably slippery and elusive work largely thanks to the constantly shifting whims of the protagonist Palace (Diamond Stingily). There’s a care toward ensuring that she never maps to any obvious archetype as Palace navigates a simple but strange final day in her art school program. Syms finds fascinating ways to inject various visual languages — including brief flashes of memes — that illuminate the character’s consciousness in unexpected ways. I’m eager to see where she can take this sensibility next with more resources at her disposal.
Babyteeth by Shannon Murphy, available to rent from various digital platforms
If you want a teen illness movie as neatly-packaged as The Fault in Our Stars, don’t watch Babyteeth. But if you want to see something that feels as raw and honest as dealing with mortality in your youth must be, Shannon Murphy’s poignant directorial debut will take you on a rollercoaster. One thing I loved about this film was how this controlled but chaotic tonality had a compliment in the sound mix. “These days, everybody wants to clean up sound perfectly, and I think it’s actually kind of tipped into a territory where it doesn’t sound real to me,” Murphy told me in an interview for Slant Magazine. “I like more of a documentary-sounding world because it makes you feel like you’re much more embedded in that story as an audience.
CRSHD by Emily Cohn, Tubi
I think filmmakers are only just starting to crack the code on how to depict social media — where people live so much of their lives — on screen. I give Emily Cohn enormous credit for taking a big swing in her teen movie CRSHD in making the digital realm into something tactile. “Cohn visualizes apps like Messages and Tinder in a low-rent way that’s scrappy yet effective,” I wrote in a dispatch from the Tribeca Film Festival back in 2019 for Crooked Marquee. “She finds corresponding offline analogues for these pixelated spaces and integrates them into a night of mayhem surrounding a crush party.”
The Fits by Anna Rose Holmer, available for free on Pluto TV
Anna Rose Holmer accomplishes something extraordinary with Royalty Hightower, the 10-year-old star of her freshman feature The Fits. It’s essentially a silent film-style performance in a film full of sound and fury. Through her largely nonverbal boxer-turned-dancer Toni, Hightower establishes pathos quickly and never lets up. Holmer utilizes Paul Yee’s camera to capture the subtlety in Toni’s yearning to join the more feminine girls on the other side of the door in her gym. The duo never tries to explain the newfound passion for rhythm and dance, instead capturing Toni’s looks of admiration even as they are greeted with scornful curiosity. As the camera stares deeper, events get stranger. A spate of heavy breathing spasms overcomes the dance crew’s leaders, and Toni seems indirectly responsible for it all. Despite (or maybe because of?) the freak occurrences, Toni begins coming into her own with the footwork — and the same can be said of Holmer behind the camera.
Landline by Gillian Robespierre, Amazon Prime Video
If her breakout first feature Obvious Child showcased that Gillian Robespierre could helm a character study, then Landline exhibits her talent with an ensemble piece. She crafts an indelible portrait of the women in the Jacobs family, each at different life stages yet all struggling to feel love from important companions. Matriarch Pat (Edie Falco) puts so much effort into maintaining family structure and function that her relationships have frayed with everyone, especially her charming but wishy-washy husband Alan (John Turturro). Adult daughter Dana (Jenny Slate) waffles on a marital commitment to fiancé Ben (Jay Duplass), even going to the extent of acting out an alter ego named “Bedelia” that indulges her pent-up desires. Teenage daughter Ali (Abby Quinn) takes to surrounding herself with drugs and dancing to dull her disinterest in the traditional roadmap laid out ahead of her. While the director has mostly been working in television since this sophomore film played Sundance in 2017, it’s time to get her back on the big screen. This is the style of Woody Allen-reminiscent dramedy we miss.
Murina by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović, available to rent from various digital platforms
It takes a decisive directorial voice to find stability amidst indecision, and that’s exactly what Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović does in her first film, Murina. It helps to cast a leading lady as preternaturally assured as Gracija Filipović, who plays the equally ambitious and ambivalent Julija. She’s just fine working in the family business on a remote island, but all begins to change when a charismatic foreign entrepreneur enters the picture and teases the possibility of a greater life beyond the sea. “Julija is frequently in a state of active spectatorship, taking in the events around her and contemplating how she can jump in herself,” I wrote in my review for The Playlist, “It’s in that gulf between intention and action where Kusijanović wrings exquisite tension out of Murina.”
My First Film by Zia Anger, MUBI
Here’s someone I am a bit worried about not getting much of a chance to make another movie, so pony up, financiers! Zia Anger turned her struggles with directing a debut feature into a work of aching self-critical vulnerability with the aptly titled My First Film. Her willingness to turn the lens back on herself and accept failure as a necessary component of art is something that deserves to be championed, not punished. “It might never happen again like this and might never be as good,” Anger described to me as she released My First Film into the world, “but now I really will always strive for and work toward that.”
Tótem by Lila Avilés, Criterion Channel
Lest you think I’m susceptible to being bought off: this slot for Lila Avilés Tótem was secured weeks before she supplied me with some great mezcal at a reception following a new short film she directed. (But, let me assure you, it didn’t hurt.) This beautiful family drama is equal parts heartwarming and heartbreaking as it plunges us into the ecosystem of a big birthday party that’s more of a living funeral. “The goal was to catch that relationship within families,” Avilés told me last year in an interview for Slant Magazine. “It’s nice to catch those codes and the relationship between the sisters that’s so unique and has its own language. That’s something nice about big families: Everyone has their own personality. [Capturing them] is an exercise of patience.”
What They Had by Elizabeth Chomko, available to rent from various digital platforms
I get that small, tender family dramas like Elizabeth Chomko’s What They Had aren’t exactly going to set the world on fire. But it’s solidly mounted and expertly orchestrated enough that she deserves more credits than one episode of the Martin Scorsese show about saints on Fox Nation! Chomko’s background in playwriting shows as a family diaspora re-converges upon a Chicago apartment to deal with their matriarch (Blythe Danner) ailing from Alzheimer’s. “What They Had mostly brims over with empathic lessons gained from intense family dialogue,” I wrote in my review for /Film back in 2018. “But the emotional effect lingers, particularly when it comes to any part of the film involving Michael Shannon's tender performance.” Everyone from Hilary Swank to Robert Forster also contributes to something special.
White Girl by Elizabeth Wood, Amazon Prime Video
I can’t say I’m too surprised Elizabeth Wood hasn’t made another movie since White Girl given how easy it is to mistake the film’s provocations for endorsements. Her is a veritable sociological treatise, like the killer anecdote to open a dry chapter of academic literature about the privilege enjoyed by the figures of its title. Morgan Saylor’s Leah is a well-off Oklahoma import who can afford to take an unpaid magazine internship and gives so little care that she wears a necklace reading “Cocaine.” She continues to flaunt her privilege around the neighborhood by crossing the traditional class barrier between drug dealers and consumers. Her pleasure is their economic livelihood; her recreation, their income. She can turn around one day and write off her involvement with drugs as an immature phase, but in a crash course about how reality works, she finds that the same doesn’t go for the dealer who captures her heart. (Or maybe just makes her feel guilty. Who’s to say?!)
Despite this time of year having a reputation for being dead at the movie theater, I can assure you many great films are coming your way this month! Look out for both Eephus and On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which opened last Friday in limited release. I interviewed writer/director Carson Lund of the former as well as writer/director Rungano Nyoni and star Susan Chardy for the latter over at Slant Magazine.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
Why lie? It’s Amanda Seyfried covering Joni Mitchell’s “California” and playing the dulcimer at least 100 times.
Here’s a galaxy-brained cultural essay that I recommend everyone wrestle with: “The End of Seriousness” by Lauren Michele Jackson at The New Yorker.
Two fun but heady trend pieces worth your time: the chaotic twinks like the one in Anora at GQ, as well as alienated labor running amok via work doubles in everything from Mickey 17 to Severance over on Little White Lies.
And let’s end on a high note! The New York Times reports on a resurgence in theatrical moviegoing across France (gift article). We should follow their lead…
Back to paid subscribers over the weekend with something fun on how a celebrated — yet still underrated — filmmaker can teach us how to watch movies.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall