Women on Film

A window on Sight & Sound’s ongoing coverage of women’s cinema, from female-focussed films and movies made by women to reports and comment on the ongoing underrepresentation of women in the film industry at large.

2020

2019

2018

  • Female firsts: four debut features by women at London Film Festival 2018

    Female firsts: four debut features by women at London Film Festival 2018

    Gender inclusivity was at the heart of the LFF agenda this year with 38 per cent of films directed by women. These distinctive female-directed debuts bode well for future parity, writes Alex Ramon.
    Friday 26 October 2018

  • The delights of Muriel Box

    The delights of Muriel Box

    A retrospective at San Sebastian reveals Britain’s most prolific female director to be one of its best, especially when it comes to the ambitious satire of The Passionate Stranger or the magical realism of Happy Family, writes Neil Young.
    Tuesday 23 October 2018

  • Lois Weber: it’s time to celebrate this pioneering director

    Lois Weber: it’s time to celebrate this pioneering director

    Once regarded as one of America’s finest directors, Lois Weber was all but written out of film history. Now – with two of her works on Blu-ray and upcoming screenings in Cambridge and Bath – we can see what the fuss was about, writes Pamela Hutchinson.
    Thursday 18 October 2018

  • Grace Elliott: a woman filming a woman interviewing a man

    Grace Elliott: a woman filming a woman interviewing a man

    A mysterious female director created these short and surprising publicity segments in the early 1930s. What else could she have done on a larger canvas, asks Brad Stevens.
    Thursday 11 October 2018

  • Skate and awake: how Skate Kitchen confronts skateboarding’s wall of machismo

    Skate and awake: how Skate Kitchen confronts skateboarding’s wall of machismo

    Crystal Moselle’s fictionalised verité portrait of New York’s all-women Skate Kitchen collective remakes the language of skate cinema to show us a more open, emancipated and inspiring culture, says Sander Hölsgens.
    Thursday 27 September 2018

  • Alienation and the limits of access at Edinburgh 2018

    Alienation and the limits of access at Edinburgh 2018

    The festival that prides itself doing things differently made room for some welcome outsider voices in its programme this year, but it was far from inclusive for everyone, reports Rebecca Harrison.
    Wednesday 11 July 2018

  • Raze the red carpet: Cannes 2018 responds to #MeToo

    Raze the red carpet: Cannes 2018 responds to #MeToo

    To the #TimesUp moment and the world after Weinstein, Cannes offered an anti-harrasment hotline – but mostly just ceded its platform to women themselves to make the change, says Rebecca Harrison.
    Friday 18 May 2018

  • Breaking the silence: Hot Docs 2018 addresses the #MeToo moment

    Breaking the silence: Hot Docs 2018 addresses the #MeToo moment

    Toronto’s international documentary film festival showcased a series of films that reckon with our moment of sexual-relations redress – offering a vision of creative nonfiction as a space to transcend victimhood, writes Simran Hans.
    Thursday 17 May 2018

  • All tease, no tale: Hollywood’s misplaced lady lands

    All tease, no tale: Hollywood’s misplaced lady lands

    The dumping-to-Netflix of Alex Garland’s women-led sci-fi thriller Annihilation, like the elided matriarchies of Wonder Woman, Thor: Ragnarok and Godless, suggests that cinema’s gatekeepers still aren’t ready to see any vision of women in charge, says Charlotte Richardson Andrews.
    Thursday 15 March 2018

  • Girl friends on film: the rare case of lifelike female friendships on the big screen

    Girl friends on film: the rare case of lifelike female friendships on the big screen

    While male ‘buddy’ movies are a genre to themselves, films about women’s relationships are remarkable for their scarcity – to say nothing of those that dare to depict the bonds of female kinship in the round, writes Hannah McGill.
    Monday 5 March 2018

  • Women on a Bergman screen – a video essay

    Women on a Bergman screen – a video essay

    Swedish master Ingmar Bergman’s fascination with female experience and emotions underpinned one of the cinema’s greatest virtual communities of women on screen. In this video study Leigh Singer invites Bergman’s talented actresses and their creations into closest possible correspondence.
    Friday 2 February 2018

2017

  • All I desire: women watching men at the movies

    All I desire: women watching men at the movies

    To mark the publication of Christina Newland’s new collection of women’s film writing She Found It at the Movies, here’s her manifesto for a proudly subjective, impressionistic and lusty female film criticism, from our October 2017 issue.
    Tuesday 31 March 2020

  • Listen to the actress: Annette Bening, directly

    Listen to the actress: Annette Bening, directly

    Against the backdrop of breaking Harvey Weinstein disclosures, the star of The Grifters and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool held forth on stage at the London Film Festival – bringing home how rare it is for women in the industry to be truly heard, writes Thirza Wakefield.
    Friday 24 November 2017

  • What next after Harvey Weinstein?

    What next after Harvey Weinstein?

    Key figures from the UK film industry on what steps need to be taken in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
    Monday 6 November 2017

  • No guide to the future: the BFI Filmography reveals the thin wedge of female British filmmaking past

    No guide to the future: the BFI Filmography reveals the thin wedge of female British filmmaking past

    The BFI’s new searchable graphic database of British film production credits since 1911 shows us the stark historical lack of opportunities for women – but behind the dismal numbers there are characters with stories to be told, says Pamela Hutchinson.
    Friday 29 September 2017

  • “We will be the mainstream”: female filmmakers talk revolution in Seoul

    “We will be the mainstream”: female filmmakers talk revolution in Seoul

    At the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, a new generation of politically engaged feminists flocked to see female directors and their trailblazing films, reports Sophie Mayer.
    Tuesday 27 June 2017

  • The black feminine on screen: 11 key auteurs

    The black feminine on screen: 11 key auteurs

    From Daughters of the Dust to Lemonade, a distinctly interior, subjective aesthetic binds a number of films made by and about black women. Tega Okiti spotlights 11 of the varied individuals and collectives at the heart of this often marginalised cinematic tradition.
    Saturday 17 June 2017

  • Six films by new and emerging female filmmakers at Cannes 2017

    Six films by new and emerging female filmmakers at Cannes 2017

    The competition may have been lacklustre overall but that wasn’t the case elsewhere at Cannes, where the sidebars were brimming with great films by first- and second-time female directors, reports Isabel Stevens. Distributors take note!
    Friday 2 June 2017

  • Ishtar, Elaine May and the road not taken

    Ishtar, Elaine May and the road not taken

    This misunderstood 1980s comedy critiqued 1980s American foreign policy and parodied male narcissism, which is probably why it also destroyed its director’s career, writes Brad Stevens.
    Monday 24 April 2017

  • Rewind Fast Forward: Sandi Hughes’s radical film archive

    Rewind Fast Forward: Sandi Hughes’s radical film archive

    By preserving images of black and gay life in and around Liverpool, Hughes has created a powerful archive of her own, and raw material for other filmmakers to refashion into revelatory new works, writes Grace Barber-Plentie.
    Thursday 6 April 2017

  • Different for Girls: a lesbian series that dramatises sex and life

    Different for Girls: a lesbian series that dramatises sex and life

    Jacquie Lawrence’s sexy lesbian La Ronde, set in and out of the households of south-west London, has been brought to life by Campbell X’s direction, and no one dies. Is that why it isn’t on TV, asks Sophie Mayer?
    Friday 17 March 2017

  • Signature Move review: Jennifer Reeder revives the 90s’ New Queer Cinema

    Signature Move review: Jennifer Reeder revives the 90s’ New Queer Cinema

    An amateur-wrestler lawyer navigates love, family and coming out in this heartfelt and cleverly constructed multicultural queer romance, writes Sophie Mayer.
    Tuesday 21 March 2017

  • Hooray for Jeni LeGon: the Hollywood pioneer who “danced like a boy”

    Hooray for Jeni LeGon: the Hollywood pioneer who “danced like a boy”

    Hollywood’s ingrained racism deprived Jeni LeGon of a great dance career – an emblematic injustice that’s both recounted and countered in Zadie Smith’s brilliant new novel Swing Time, writes Pamela Hutchinson.
    Wednesday 8 March 2017

2016

The Female Gaze (2015)

  • Sight & Sound: the October 2015 issue

    Sight & Sound: the October 2015 issue

    The Female Gaze: 100 underrated films directed by women, with contributions from Agnès Varda, Jane Campion, Claire Denis, Isabelle Huppert, Tilda Swinton, Greta Gerwig and more. Plus Tom Hardy and Legend, Horse Money, Mia Madre and Lucrecia Martel.

  • Women with a movie camera

    Women with a movie camera

    Behind every great female-directed film is a female director. It’s time to make them iconic, says Isabel Stevens.
    Monday 7 September 2015

  • Scissor sisters

    Scissor sisters

    Given the maleness of the industry, it’s a surprise to realise just how many classic films have been crafted by female editors, says Mark Cousins.
    Monday 7 September 2015

  • Year of the Woman – and archives full of women!

    Year of the Woman – and archives full of women!

    Sophie Mayer on the internet debut of Sandra Hochman’s Year of the Woman – and the visions of feminism now emerging from the archives.
    Monday 7 September 2015

  • Archives online: Margaret Tait’s rooms of her own

    Archives online: Margaret Tait’s rooms of her own

    Thirza Wakefield on the homespun, one-woman cinema of Margaret Tait in the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive: 48 emblems of a cinema “what’s welling up in people to make”.
    Friday 25 September 2015

  • Target: equality

    Target: equality

    Holly Aylett on calls from European leaders for action to foster change in the film industry.
    Friday 11 September 2015

  • Washed away: lost films by female directors

    Washed away: lost films by female directors

    Cinema’s pre-segregated heyday of female filmmaking is sadly also its most hidden from history. Here seven critics nominate lost treasures they hope might yet be rediscovered.
    Friday 2 October 2015

  • Toons by women at Encounters 2015

    Toons by women at Encounters 2015

    Female animators weren’t on the wane at this year’s Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival. Alex Dudok de Wit picks a handful of the standouts.
    Wednesday 21 October 2015

  • Different strengths: women to the fore (and aft) at London 2015

    Different strengths: women to the fore (and aft) at London 2015

    Women were in the spotlight at this year’s London Film Festival, from Suffragette’s opening-gala platform to the Geena Davis Institute’s campaign on gender representation. But did the emphasis on symbols overshadow subjects and sensibilities, asks Simran Hans?
    Friday 30 October 2015

  • ‘Strong’ women – latinate quarter at London 2015

    ‘Strong’ women – latinate quarter at London 2015

    With women on film centre-stage at this year’s London Film Festival, Mar Diestro-Dópido rounds up ten films with a female flavour from Latin America, Spain, France and Italy.
    Thursday 5 November 2015

  • A pantheon of one’s own: 25 female film critics worth celebrating

    A pantheon of one’s own: 25 female film critics worth celebrating

    A selection of critics and curators each nominate a vital female voice in film criticism, with an example of their writing.
    Sunday 8 March 2015

2014

Women on Film: Female film reporter competition (2013)

Women on Film: the Sight & Sound competition for female film writers (2011)

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