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Tracking down the work of female directors to stream can require dedication. We’re here to help…
It’s International Women’s Day this weekend, which you’d think presents an easy enough opportunity for streaming sites to promote a timely season or two: a selection of feminist films, or key works by female film-makers, and so on. Yet there doesn’t appear to be much out there. Perhaps marketing films by and about 50% of the world’s population for a single day strikes the big guns as unnecessary; perhaps it doesn’t occur to them at all. Yet at a time when, on balance, even major female directors’ films tend to be harder to track down online than those by their male counterparts, it seems worth doing some curating on one’s own.
Mubi is the one site marking the occasion, streaming Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s elegant, empowering coming-of-age tale Mustang as their International Women’s Day pick – though their rotating menu, to be fair, is more conscientiously inclusive than most. Right now, for example, you can stream Little Joe director Jessica Hausner’s meticulously ambiguous spiritual fable Lourdes, Claire Denis’s untamed, sensualist sci-fi High Life or Belgian director Isabelle Tollenaere’s short The Remembered Film, an inventive soldier study blurring and overlapping multiple wars, from their selection. Continue reading...