Here's a thread that runs down all the films I recommended when I talked to @NPRWeekend about 2019 and women directors. *It is not all the films by women directors!* I sped along to include as many as I could.
First, the ones you may know: LITTLE WOMEN from Greta Gerwig. HUSTLERS from Lorene Scafaria. BOOKSMART from Olivia Wilde. THE FAREWELL from Lulu Wang. A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD from Marielle Heller.
Let's talk about more! FAST COLOR is from Julia Hart. Three generations of black women with superpowers. Lorraine Toussaint! Gugu Mbatha-Raw! Tense, surprising, magical, moving. Streaming on Hulu, available to rent elsewhere.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE. From Celine Sciamma. Romantic, transfixing, gorgeous, sexy, about desire and art and feeling freedom and constraints. Still coming to a wide US release; be patient. It's worth it.
QUEEN AND SLIM from Melina Matsoukas, who directed "Formation." Mesmerizing images of night, cars, people. Worth watching partly to read the great writing about it. Still in theaters.
ATLANTICS from Mati Diop. Lyrical, moody, romantic, indelible. Breathtaking contrast between bright days and eerie blue nights. Another film from 2019 that tackles class, from an expected angle. On Netflix.
The point of the segment, I hope, was this: Films directed by women are sometimes a little bit harder to find for a variety of structural reasons. But fantastic work from both experienced and new directors is are abundant, and more than ever, you can find it for yourself. /fin
(Sorry -- had to redo the end of the thread because of an autocorrect error with Mati Diop's name.)
(Behind-the-scenes trivia: In case they had to make this segment shorter, and stubbornly not wanting any of the films to get cut for time, I gave them a version where I described these films so briefly and quickly that I sounded like an auctioneer. I'm happy they didn't use it.)
