History Makers: What to Look for from Women Filmmakers in 2024

To celebrate Women’s History Month, this article is the first of three AwardsWatch articles that focus on the theme of women in film.  Even though men dominate the film making industry, women as early as the late nineteenth century have staked their claim on celluloid with French director Alice Guy-Blaché leading the charge in silent films. The 1934 Hays Code limited women’s ability to lead as decision makers so they took more supporting roles behind the camera, but Dorothy Arzner’s conventional storytelling helped her to survive the sanitization and commercialization of the industry.  Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was the top grossing domestic and worldwide box office movie of 2023 and Barbenheimer, the marketing rivalry with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, produced the fourth largest American box office ever, a field normal under Disney’s command.

Categorized as opening in 2023 to qualify for award considerations, but not theatrically released until this year, prestigious women filmmakers started the year strong. With her best film to date, Ava DuVernay’s Origin dramatizes events leading up to the writing of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s seminal text on bias, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The film delivered a rousing personal story about Wilkerson surviving tragedies by connecting with others through her international research. Second time Academy Award nominee and Tunisian filmmaker Karouther Ben Hania’s documentary, Four Daughters, was made before May December and covers similar provocative themes. The real-life subjects of the documentary, mother Olfa Hamrouni, and her two younger daughters, Eya and Tayssir Chikhaoui, collaborate with actors to recreate and examine the reasons that the elder two daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaul, ran away to neighboring Libya to join Daesh, which Westerners know as Isis. Shayda, Australia’s Academy Awards submission, which Cate Blanchett executive produced, follows the titular Iranian mother (Holy Spider’s Zar Amir Ebrahimi), who is seeking a divorce in Australia to avoid returning to Iran with her abusive husband and faces the threat of losing custody of her daughter. Shayda director and writer Noora Niasari used her childhood as inspiration for the tale of immigrants becoming reacclimated to normal life in a foreign world.

Except for Blackfish’s Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s I.S.S. and R.B.G.’s Carla Gutierrez’s documentary, Frida, which will be available now, the winter releases departed from the realism of the films with Oscar ambitions. First time feature writer Lucy Campbell had a strong start with Monolith, a film about a disgraced journalist (Lily Sullivan) turned podcaster who uncovers a story about mysterious black bricks delivered to random people since the eighties. As she determines that the phenomenon is not a hoax, she begins to experience the same side effects as the brick recipients and loses her professional distance from the story. Diablo Cody made a comeback pairing with debut director Zelda Williams, daughter of iconic comedian Robin Williams, in making a new cult hit, Lisa Frankenstein, which is set in the 80s about a misfit teenager who befriends a Victorian era reanimated musical composer. The pair wreak nostalgic havoc as the Creature kills people who threaten Lisa. The film is out now from Focus Features. Saint Maud director Rose Glass does not suffer a sophomore slump in her stylish, hilarious, graphic and erotic Love Lies Bleeding. Currently in limited release from A24, New Mexico lesbian gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) falls hard for body builder Jackie (Katy O’Brien), who is just passing through. Their burgeoning relationship gets them ensnared in the town’s criminal underworld drama.

Anticipated new premieres from women directors feature some repeat players who decided to collaborate and see if lightning strikes twice. Miranda’s Victim duo, actor Abigail Breslin and director Michelle Danner, pair up again in The Italians, a story about an Italian American family that meets the son’s fiancé, who is not what they expected. The Lost Daughter actors Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman team up once again on March 29 in director Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters from Sony Pictures Classics, a crime comedy investigating whether someone is framing Irish migrant Rose (Buckley) who is alleged to author profanity-filled letters, which runs her afoul of the law.

Women directors will also helm franchises, prequels, sequels, remakes and reimagings, but it remains to be seen whether they are breaking through the celluloid ceiling or falling off the celluloid cliff. Netflix Marvel franchise and notable television series director S.J. Clarkson got saddled with widely panned Madame Web, the latest in the lackluster Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU), and hopefully her feature debut will be the only setback in an otherwise accomplished career. The jury is still out on whether the studio’s Venom franchise writer Kelly Marcel will suffer the same fate in her November 8 directorial debut Venom 3. It bodes well that this franchise is the fan favorite of the SSU. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood passes The Old Guard baton to her friend, director Victoria Mahoney, who will be directing the sequel. The initial installment met great success on Netflix and is about surreptitious immortal warriors facing a threat of exposure with Charlize Theron playing the group’s leader.  Director M.J. Bassett and writer Tasha Huo get a stab at a second adaptation of the comic book Red Sonja, which is a hard act to follow considering the 1985 cult hit starring Brigitte Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger is unforgettable. On April 5, movie lovers will have two options. First, Emmy-nominated star, director, and co-writer Vera Drew parodies DC Comics with an autobiographical twist in The People’s Joker, which will finally see the light of day. The film premiered on September 13, 2022, at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, but planned screenings of the film were canceled after Warner Bros. issued letter believing the film infringed on their copyright. The autofiction comedy is a trans origin coming of age film focusing on Joker the Harlequin, an aspiring comedian in a Gotham that outlawed comedy. Second, Satan’s baby mama gets the prequel treatment in television series director Arkasha Stevenson’s film feature debut, The First Omen from 20th Century Studios.

The horror genre has more than its fair share of female filmmakers. Director Diane Foster and writer Allison Lobel perform behind and in front of the camera in Easter Bloody Easter, which will be out on March 26 and is perfect timing for those looking to celebrate the holiday by watching a budget horror flick about an evil bunny that is not related to Monty Python or any bunny who traumatized Anya in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Co-writer and co-director Anna Hallberg collaborates with fellow co-director and co-writer Spenser Cohen for the adaptation of Nicholas Adams’s novel, Horrorscope. Expected to premiere on May 3, Tarot revolves around college students who begin dying after having their tarot card fortunes told.  Another book adaptation is expected on June 14 when Ishana Shyamalan, daughter of inconsistent horror king M. Night Shyamalan, gets to prove whether she is another nepo baby or a formidable talent who did not need daddy’s leverage. Her film directorial debut, an adaptation of A.M. Shine’s novel, The Watchers, is about strangers stranded in a forest who shelter in a bunker as refuge from mysterious creatures.

On the international front, several foreign films are finally coming to America. European filmmaker Harriet Marin Jones has been collecting awards at various film festivals for her documentary King of Kings: Chasing Edward Jones, which traces her family origins back to one of the US’ richest Black men, who had to outwit the government and most fearsome Chicago gangsters, including The Outfit’s Sam Giancana. The theme of family dramas carries over in the foreign dramatic feature category. Bosnian filmmaker Ena Sendijarević’s sophomore film, Sweet Dreams, was the Dutch entry for the Oscars’ Best International Feature Film. Set in the early 20^th century in the Dutch East Indies, the death of a plantation owner disrupts the colonialist status quo when he leaves his property to his child—not the one that he had with his wife, but the son of his Indonesian housemaid. Quebecois writer and director Sophie Dupuis’ latest film, Solo, chronicles a young drag queen’s struggle in a romantic relationship and the return of the entertainer’s mother after a fifteen-year estrangement. New Zealand’s warrior princess Lucy Lawless directs her gaze on fellow New Zealander, CNN war zone camerawoman Margaret Moth, in her documentary Never Look Away.

For those with more mainstream tastes, Sam Taylor-Johnson directs the music biopic Back to Black about the rise and fall of Amy Winehouse, which will open on May 17. On May 30, in her directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, Academy Award nominee Anna Kendrick will star as contestant Cheryl Bradshaw who met serial killer Rodney Alcala on a 1978 episode of The Dating Game. Academy Award nominee and cinematographer Rachel Morrison, makes her feature directorial debut in a sports bio pic, Flint Strong, about Claressa ‘T-Rex’ Shields, the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing.  Winners of the 2024 Sundance Audience Award in Documentary Competition, Angela Patton and Natale Rae, gave Daughters’ distribution rights to Netflix so you can soon watch the documentary about the Date With Dad program, a fatherhood program at a Washington DC Jail.  In less salutary daddy daughter time, India Donaldson’s drama, Good One, captures an awkward weekend hike in the Catskills for a 17-year-old girl witnessing her father and his oldest friend butting heads.

Make sure to mark your calendars, set up your Google alerts and vote with your dollars by running to the theater and supporting women filmmakers if you want to level the playing field and any of these films interest you. Movies are not just art or entertainment, but a business, and you get what you pay for.

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