Top up your watchlist... 38 classics directed by women

Director: Vera Chytilová

Two self-confessed hedonists wreak wanton havoc in this visually spectacular, neo-dadaist farce. Vera Chytilová’s best known film and a stone cold classic of the Czech New Wave.

Directors: Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen

An experimental classic on the demands of motherhood from British filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey.

Director: Helma Sanders-Brahms

A key work of the New German Cinema, charting a relationship, and by extension a nation, between 1939 and 1950.

Directors: Greta Schiller, Robert Rosenberg

Greta Schiller’s documentary examines the LGBTQ community at New York’s Stonewall Inn in the period leading up to the 1969 riot.

Director: Molly Dineen

One single day in the life of the London Underground’s Northern Line, from Canadian filmmaker Molly Dineen.

Director: Ildikó Enyedi

The sophomore feature from Hungary’s Ildikó Enyedi, who won the 2017 Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival for On Body and Soul.

Director: Antonia Bird

An ace British bank robbery flick from Antonia Bird. Starring Ray Winstone and Robert Carlyle, a close-knit gang of professional thieves plan an intricate heist but begin to turn on each other when things go wrong.

Director: Carine Adler

Samantha Morton’s Iris spins out of control following the death of her mother in one of the great British films of the 90s.

Director: Sandra Goldbacher

A coming-of-age tale set on the Isle of Wight and in Brighton in the 1970s and 80s, with a terrific pair of central performances from Michelle Williams and Anna Friel.

Director: Cate Shortland

The breakout film for Cate Shortland (soon to be directing Black Widow for Marvel) with a sensational lead turn from Abbie Cornish.

Director: Andrea Arnold

The film that brought Andrea Arnold international attention, Red Road is a magnificent study in voyeurism, confrontation and shame.

Director: Sarah Gavron

Adapted from the Monica Ali novel by Sarah Gavron, Brick Lane charts the arranged marriage of a young Bangladeshi woman in 1980s east London.

Director: Joanna Hogg

With her latest film, The Souvenir, garnering raves from all directions, here’s Joanna Hogg’s debut feature, about a woman taking refuge from a broken relationship in Tuscany.

Director: Courtney Hunt

Melissa Leo leads a thriller set at the border crossing between Quebec and New York State, where a smuggling ring threatens the local Mohawk community.

Directors: Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy

Hitchcock would’ve liked this slippery, reflexive study in assumed identity, as a young girl takes on the persona of her missing classmate for a police reconstruction.

Director: Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel’s psychological stunner charts the fallout from a road accident, as María Onetto’s Verónica comes to terms with her own guilt and paranoia.

Director: Xiaolu Guo

British-Chinese director Xiaolu Guo explores the itinerant existence of Chinese arrivals to London through the story of Li Mei, a Chinese girl who drifts from affair to affair, finding herself in ever more suffocating situations in a city that supposedly offers untold freedoms.

Director: Susanne Bier

Susanne Bier’s sumptuous, Oscar-winning drama explores the duality of a doctor working in a Sudanese refugee camp and his troubled family life in rural Denmark.

Director: Clio Barnard

An inventive play on fact, fiction and reminiscence, Clio Barnard’s film about the late Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar is no ordinary documentary.

Director: Ann Hui

Ann Hui, one of the great humanists of the Hong Kong New Wave, brings a captivating story of a film executive reconnecting with the nanny who raised him.

Director: Céline Sciamma

A 10-year-old girl, settling into her new neighbourhood outside Paris, is mistaken for a boy and has to live up to this new identity since it’s too late for the mistake to be clarified.

Director: Penny Woolcock

Award-winning filmmaker Penny Woolcock’s beautiful film is drawn from the BFI National Archive. A collage portrait of Britain’s coastline with a score by British Sea Power.

Director: Sally El Hosaini

Sally El Hosaini’s acclaimed feature debut focuses on two teenage British-Egyptian brothers living in Hackney; their love for each other is threatened when gang life, drugs and sex come between them.

Director: Annemarie Jacir

Palestine’s entry for the 2013 Academy Awards follows a young boy’s attempts to be reunited with his father following the 1967 Six-Day War.

Director: Kelly Reichardt

This taut political thriller from American master Kelly Reichardt follows a trio of radical environmental activists planning an act of terrorism.

Director: Jessica Hausner

Jessica Hausner’s long-awaited follow-up to Lourdes is a mischievous satire on the conceits of Romantic-era fiction, in which a German poet seeks mates for a suicide pact.

Director: Lucie Borleteau

When Alice takes a job as a ship’s engineer her fidelity towards her shore-bound fiancé is tested when she discovers a former lover is the ship’s captain.

Director: Debbie Tucker Green

Debbie Tucker Green stages an immaculate conception in south London for one of the most original British films of recent years.

Director: Ondi Timoner

Russell Brand ponders his political awakening and messianic tendencies in Ondi Timoner’s perceptive and very funny documentary.

Director: Lucile Hadzihalilovic

The long-awaited second feature from Lucile Hadzihalilović is a gorgeously surreal coming-of-age tale laced with bizarre body-horror.

Director: Angela Spielsinger

A groundbreaking documentary that uses archive film to tell the story of the British Deaf community’s fight for civil rights.

Director: Naomi Kawase

Naomi Kawase followed her acclaimed drama Still the Water with this charming, small-town drama of culinary redemption, which opened the prestigious Un Certain Regard strain of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Director: Jane Linfoot

Jane Linfoot’s clinically constructed study of guilt, betrayal and responsibility concerns a comfortable family whose seemingly perfect lives are suddenly thrown into turmoil.

Director: Anocha Suwichakornpong

Anocha Suwichakornpong’s mesmerising and innovative treatise on memory, politics and cinema is a formally breathtaking piece of work. Essential viewing.

Director: Sabine Krayenbühl

Tilda Swinton narrates the extraordinary journey of Gertrude Bell, a singular woman who played a significant – often unrecognised – role in British imperial policy-making in Iraq.

Director: Carol Salter

Awarded Best Documentary at the 2017 British Independent Film Awards, Carol Salter’s film is a tender portrait of a young woman training to become a mortician at one of China’s largest funeral homes.

Director: Mitra Tabrizian

This mesmerising slow-burn thriller sees a man with no past, no future and no convictions get involved in the conflict of a total stranger, carrying it through to the very end.

Director: Gabrielle Brady

A therapist helps traumatised refugees detained on a remote island where powerful natural and tribal rituals prevail, in this extraordinary mix of fact and fiction.