FLMS 300 - World Cinema Directed by Women

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Female film directors lack visibility as a result of the gender inequality that is still perpetuated in the film industry. This represents a potential gap in our understanding of human experience and it affects how women are portrayed in the real world. Stories tell us what societies value, they offer us lessons, and they share and preserve our history. No matter how many movies with original screenplays and state of the art technology have been recently produced, if the female point of view of reality is limited and reduced, then we continue reinforcing gender roles and gendered stereotypes and we are only exposed to half of the point of view of society.
This course aims at enriching the map of global cinema by giving visibility to female film directors that have actively contributed to the film industry and to the history of cinema. The goal is to move towards a much-needed representation of gender equity by studying these filmmakers’ cultural production as work that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion. This class will also introduce students to some of the central debates within feminism from the 1970s onwards, with a focus on questions of female authorship within the broader cultural contexts of the feminist movement, gay, lesbian, and queer studies, and developments in the fields of race, class and post-colonial studies.
This course will also pay attention to how these female directors, having gained full awareness of the different forms of gender discrimination in the film industry in front of and behind the camera, are developing alternative modes of filming and representing. Some of the directors that we will include in the course are Lucía Puenzo (Argentina), Jane Campion (Australia), Kathryn Bigelow (US), Celine Sciamma (France), Sara Gómez (Cuba), Cheryl Dunye (US), Ava DuVernay, Marjane Sartrapi (Iran), and Miwa Nishikawa (Japan), among others. (Group III)