It was a Thursday evening in March 2023, wine already opened, and I spent forty minutes scrolling through streaming apps. There were hundreds of titles, and not one of them was pulling me in. On a whim, I typed "female directors" into the search bar. The page filled up with films I knew by name and had never watched. I clicked on Jane Campion's The Piano, which had won the Palme d'Or thirty years earlier. I cried — less from sadness than from anger at having waited so long.
I've built this list over two years of watching, with no quota and no box-ticking: every film is here because it's worth an evening, and every one was directed by a woman whose name we should all know.
Why films by female directors matter right now
The numbers first, because they're telling. In the UK, a 2016 Directors UK study reported by Sight and Sound found that just 13.6% of working film directors between 2005 and 2014 were women. Among Hollywood's biggest box-office hits, it's lower still: USC Annenberg's Inclusion in the Director's Chair report counts 12% women among the directors of the 100 top-grossing films at the North American box office in 2023 — and just 6% across seventeen years, from 2007 to 2023. That's not for lack of talent.
And the timing is hard to ignore. Cannes opened its 78th edition this week, and of the 22 films in competition listed in Screen's guide to the 2025 line-up, seven are directed by women — including Lynne Ramsay's Die, My Love and Julia Ducournau's Alpha. Seven. Only three women have ever won the Palme d'Or: Jane Campion in 1993, Julia Ducournau in 2021 and Justine Triet in 2023. Worth catching up before the awards night.
Cinema history is full of female directors who were ignored, under-distributed, or whose work was credited to male collaborators. Alice Guy-Blaché, who was directing films for Gaumont before the nineteenth century was out, took decades to be recognised. Ida Lupino had to co-found her own production company in late-1940s Hollywood just to get her films made.
Talking about female directors in 2025 mostly means stumbling on ways of telling stories you rarely come across: Akerman filming more than three hours of household chores, Sciamma turning a single look into a whole love story. Here the criterion is who's behind the camera, not what the film is about: for films about bodies, power and rights, my pick of must-see feminist films takes over.
Founding films by women directors, from Germaine Dulac to Chantal Akerman
The Smiling Madame Beudet — Germaine Dulac (1923)
Thirty-six minutes, silent, and a heroine stuck in a joyless marriage to a bully. Monsieur Beudet has a nasty habit: holding an empty revolver to his head as a joke. One evening, his wife loads it. Dulac, a pioneer of the 1920s French avant-garde, films Madame Beudet's daydreams as closely as her days, and the film is often cited as one of cinema's first feminist works. If you've never sat through a silent film, start with this one.
Meshes of the Afternoon — Maya Deren (1943)
An experimental short, about a quarter of an hour, black and white. A woman, a house, a knife, a key, a mirror. Deren laid foundations for American avant-garde cinema, and you can feel her shadow all the way to David Lynch. It's easy to find online.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — Chantal Akerman (1975)
Over three hours following a widow who cleans, cooks potatoes and receives clients — she's a sex worker. No spectacular effects. No memorable dialogue. And yet in 2022, more than 1,600 critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics voted it to the top of the BFI's Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll — the first time in the poll's seventy-year history that a film by a woman came first. Akerman was only 25 when she shot it.
The Piano — Jane Campion (1993)
Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993 — the first ever awarded to a woman. Ada, mute since childhood, arrives in New Zealand with her piano. What follows is pure cinema: desire, power, silence, skin. Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, a young Anna Paquin.
Orlando — Sally Potter (1992)
Tilda Swinton as a character who lives for 400 years, changing sex along the way. Based on Virginia Woolf's novel. Potter keeps the novel's wit, and the film was properly ahead of its time on gender. If it sends you back to Woolf, our pick of must-have novels by women for your bookshelf is the natural next step.
British and European cinema by women
Andrea Arnold — Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016). Fish Tank, set on a council estate on the eastern edge of London, won the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film. It also took the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2009.
Céline Sciamma — Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). Best Screenplay at Cannes, BAFTA-nominated, acclaimed everywhere. A painter and her subject in 18th-century Brittany. A film about gaze, desire and creation — shot with a visual precision that takes your breath away. One of the greatest love stories of the past twenty years.
Lynne Ramsay (Scottish) — We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017). Ultra-sensory psychological thrillers. Ramsay doesn't film like anyone else — every image is composed like a painting, violence often happens off-screen, and trauma lives in the details. Joaquin Phoenix in You Were Never Really Here gives what may be his greatest performance.
Justine Triet — Anatomy of a Fall (2023). A writer on trial for her husband's death, and a courtroom where a marriage is taken apart line by line. It won the Palme d'Or and made Triet only the third woman to take the top prize. If you haven't seen it, it's the ideal rainy-Sunday film.
Joanna Hogg — The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021). Hogg drew on her own film-school years: Julie, a young film student in 1980s London, falls for an older man who turns out to be an addict. Tilda Swinton plays her mother. Hogg never raises her voice, and the film hurts all the more for it.
Claire Denis — Beau Travail (1999). A reworking of Melville's Billy Budd among Foreign Legion soldiers in Djibouti — and seventh in the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll. The final scene, with Denis Lavant, is unforgettable.
Genre, action and thriller directed by women
A persistent myth: female directors only make "intimate" films. Wrong.
Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director — for The Hurt Locker in 2010, a tense, frontal war film that takes masculine heroism apart. She beat her ex-husband James Cameron and Avatar that night; Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion have followed since. Zero Dark Thirty (2012) is equally powerful and more controversial.
Ida Lupino — The Hitch-Hiker (1953). Two friends heading off on a fishing trip to Baja California pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a killer on the run, and he holds them hostage all the way down the road. A lean film noir, made by the director who had to co-found her own production company to get behind the camera.
Emerald Fennell — Promising Young Woman (2020). Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. A thriller-comedy-feminist hybrid that plays with genre conventions and turns them inside out. Carey Mulligan is extraordinary. The ending is divisive — I'm firmly in the "love it" camp.
Jennifer Kent — The Babadook (2014). After her husband's death, Amelia can no longer cope with her son Samuel, until a creepy children's book about a monster in a top hat turns up in the house. The Australian director's debut is a horror film that really does frighten, and a raw portrait of grief. Watch it with the lights on (I'm only half joking).
Essential documentaries by female directors
Documentary has often given female directors more room — smaller budgets, fewer studio executives deciding for them. It's certainly where I've found some of the films that shook me most.
Waad al-Kateab — For Sama (2019, co-directed with Edward Watts). Winner of the BAFTA for Documentary. Filmed in besieged Aleppo and addressed to her daughter. A love letter filmed in hell.
Ava DuVernay — 13th (2016, a Netflix original). The history of the mass incarceration of Black Americans since the abolition of slavery. The title refers to the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime: the whole film pulls on that thread.
Kim Longinotto — Rough Aunties (2008) and Dreamcatcher (2015). Longinotto has spent her career filming women's lives around the world.
Kirsten Johnson — Cameraperson (2016). A cinematographer edits together footage she shot over many years, all over the world, for other people's films. The film is about what it feels like to witness everything through a lens, never able to intervene.
Recent films by female directors worth watching (2018-2024)
The last few years have seen a real surge — in visibility and in international recognition, with Palmes, Golden Lions and Oscars.
The Power of the Dog — Jane Campion (2021)
Netflix. The Oscar for Best Director for Campion, nearly thirty years after her Palme. A brutal rancher in Montana, his gentle brother, a fragile woman, a young man who arrives. What Campion does with toxic masculinity and repressed desire is among her very best work.
Aftersun — Charlotte Wells (2022)
A debut feature from a Scottish director. Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio as father and daughter on holiday in Turkey. On the surface, nothing much happens. Underneath: a devastating portrait of a father's depression that stays with you for weeks. The role earned Paul Mescal his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
Past Lives — Celine Song (2023)
A love story between a Korean woman living in New York and her first love who stayed in Seoul. The film is built on three encounters spread over twenty-four years. Nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and deservedly so.
All We Imagine as Light — Payal Kapadia (2024)
Grand Prix at Cannes 2024. Two nurses in Mumbai — a film about loneliness, womanhood and the city. She's the director whose next film I'm most impatient to see.
Which film by a female director to watch, depending on your mood
- Want to cry over something beautiful → Past Lives (Celine Song) or Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma)
- Want to be unsettled, challenged → Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell) or We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)
- Want epic scope, a sweeping story → The Piano or The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)
- Want a courtroom drama that grips to the end → Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
- Want a quiet film that lingers → Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)
- Want a documentary that shakes you → For Sama (Waad al-Kateab) or 13th (Ava DuVernay)
- Want to discover a complete filmmaker → Start with Fish Tank then American Honey (Andrea Arnold)
- Want a properly British story → The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg)
And if the sofa starts to feel a bit samey, our weekend ideas that go beyond dinner and a movie will give you plenty to mix up your evenings.
Where to watch films by female directors in the UK: MUBI, BFI Player, Letterboxd
MUBI is the first app I open for arthouse and auteur cinema: the catalogue rotates, but Akerman, Denis and Varda come back regularly.
BFI Player is excellent for British cinema, and the BFI's own list of 21 must-see debuts by female directors — from Rungano Nyoni's I Am Not a Witch to Rose Glass's Saint Maud — makes a ready-made watchlist.
Letterboxd is full of user-curated lists dedicated to women directors, often with sharper reviews than you'd expect.
Sight and Sound, published by the BFI, and Little White Lies are the two key UK references for serious film criticism — both regularly publish features on female directors.
And if you want to talk about it afterwards, a book club format works just as well for a film club with friends: our practical guide to starting and running a book club adapts to films with barely any tweaks.
Frequently asked questions
Which women have won the Oscar for Best Director and the Palme d'Or?
Three women have won the Academy Award for Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2010, Chloé Zhao for Nomadland in 2021 and Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog in 2022. Three have won the Palme d'Or: Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993, Julia Ducournau for Titane in 2021 and Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall in 2023. Campion is the only one to have won both.
Why are there so few female directors on big studio films?
The factors most often cited: hiring habits that hand the biggest budgets to established names, who are mostly men, too few women in the roles that decide on financing, and stubborn stereotypes about what women "can" direct — intimate stories, not action. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has counted the women directing the 100 top-grossing films at the North American box office every year since 2007: 2.7% in 2007, 12% in 2023, and a summary that says progress for women directors has stalled.
Where can I watch films by female directors in the UK?
MUBI is the go-to for arthouse. Netflix produced Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog and Ava DuVernay's 13th. BFI Player is excellent for British cinema specifically. And Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon is easy to find online.
Was Agnès Varda part of the French New Wave?
Varda is often associated with the New Wave — her film La Pointe Courte (1955) is considered a direct precursor. But she was never fully part of it: too independent, too personal, outside the Cahiers du Cinéma circle dominated by men. Critics tend to place her in the so-called "Left Bank" group, alongside Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. An important distinction.
Are films by female directors "better for women"?
Not necessarily — and it would be reductive to think so. What films by female directors often offer is a different gaze on universal experiences, and sometimes female characters who escape the usual clichés. But a man can deeply love Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and a woman can find Jeanne Dielman too much. These are films for everyone.
What is the highest-grossing film directed by a woman?
Counting films directed by a woman alone, it's Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023), which took more than $1.44 billion worldwide according to Box Office Mojo's figures for Barbie. Counting co-directed films, Frozen II (2019), co-directed by Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, edges it with more than $1.45 billion, according to Box Office Mojo's figures for Frozen II. Before either of them, British director Phyllida Lloyd's Mamma Mia! (2008) and Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman (2017) had already shown that a film directed by a woman could fill cinemas worldwide.
Which films by women are in competition at Cannes 2025?
Seven of the 22 films in the 2025 Cannes Competition are directed by women, according to the line-up in Screen's Cannes 2025 guide: Julia Ducournau's Alpha, Lynne Ramsay's Die, My Love, Hafsia Herzi's The Little Sister, Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind, Chie Hayakawa's Renoir, Carla Simón's Romería and Mascha Schilinski's Sound of Falling. The festival runs until 24 May, when the jury announces the Palme d'Or.
Sources
- BFI — Revealed: the results of the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll
- Screen — Cannes Film Festival 2025 line-up guide
- USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative — Inclusion in the Director's Chair (January 2024)
- Sight and Sound — The invisible woman: film's gender bias laid bare
- BFI — 21 must-see debuts by female directors from the last 10 years
- Box Office Mojo — Barbie (2023)
- Box Office Mojo — Frozen II (2019)