In an industry that is still dominated by male filmmakers, it can be hard for women to get a foot in the door and for audiences to find their work when they do. Then, when you consider the added factor of sexuality, lesbian filmmakers often have an even more difficult time finding sufficient funding and wide-reaching distribution for their movies and television projects. Céline Sciamma discusses how women in creative careers are at the mercy of trends in a way that men aren’t. In an interview with Vox, she says “We’re always being told about women’s progress and women’s opportunity — that we’re 'getting there.' But it’s not true. It’s cycles.”
While we, as consumers, are relatively powerless in the face of a long-standing prejudicial industry, we can still uplift and celebrate our favorite lesbian directors. Circulating their projects and spreading the word about their work can help them find new viewers that might not have been reached by a sub-par promotional campaign. In spite of the difficulties in their way, there are still many lesbian directors working on exciting and forward-thinking projects. Here are 11 of those wonderful lesbian directors from the past and the present that you should know about.
11 Clea DuVall
Clea DuVall is known to some for her acting work in movies such as But I’m a Cheerleader, Girl, Interrupted, and Argo. However, in 2016 she began to direct movies and TV shows as well, starting with The Intervention. Her best-known directorial work is Happiest Season, the festive romantic comedy starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis as the central couple.
She also co-created and directed High School, a series based on the lives of lesbian musicians and twins Tegan and Sara. DuVall’s work has a touching balance of laugh-out-loud comedy and sincerity that makes her one to watch.
10 Lisa Cholodenko
Lisa Cholodenko is a director who has displayed impressive range throughout her career. Beginning with her first feature, High Art, which depicted an intense and complex relationship between The Breakfast Club’s Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell, Cholodenko elegantly handled issues of addiction, power dynamics, and sexuality.
She then went on to make Laurel Canyon, starring Frances McDormand, and the Oscar-nominated The Kids Are All Rightwith Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. Each of these differing from the last and always breaking new ground. Along with her work in movies, she has also directed episodes of several TV shows, from Six Feet Under to Unbelievable. Most notably, she directed the eight Emmy-winning miniseries Olive Kitteridge.
9 Cheryl Dunye
Writer, director, and actor Cheryl Dunye is best known for The Watermelon Woman. This movie is a genre-bending, meta piece of work in which Dunye plays a version of herself who is making a documentary about her search into the life of a 1930s actress known as “The Watermelon Woman.” Along with the documentary portions, we also see Cheryl’s life with her friends and romantic relationships. It’s masterfully composed, maintaining a level of earnestness so that it’s never offputtingly ironic or knowing.
Aside from this, other movies from Dunye include The Owls and My Baby’s Daddy. Since 2018, Dunye has focused on TV work with projects such as The Umbrella Academy, Bridgerton, and Claws.
8 Angela Robinson
Responsible for some iconic installments in the lesbian cinema canon, Angela Robinson is a writer, director, and producer. She wrote and directed D.E.B.S., the lesbian spy romantic comedy starring Jordana Brewster that is camp in all the best ways. Robinson also directed eight episodes of The L Word across four seasons, leaving her mark on the show. Also in TV, she was a writer on Viola Davis’ How to Get Away With Murder.
A lesser-known movie from Robinson is Professor Marston & the Wonder Women, which tells the story of William Marston, the man who created Wonder Woman. The movie’s portrayal of a polyamorous relationship was impressively done, with the relationship coming across as truthful and grounded rather than being used as a shock tactic.
7 Jamie Babbit
Jamie Babbit is the director of the previously mentioned But I’m a Cheerleader, the groundbreaking lesbian romantic comedy starring Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall. Other movies from Babbit include The Stand In starring Drew Barrymore and Addicted to Fresno, which once again stars Lyonne. However, the majority of Babbit’s work has been in television, in which she has directed episodes of all your favorite shows.
From dramedies such as Gilmore Girls, A League of Their Own, and Girls to sitcoms including It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Silicon Valley, she’s done it all. With this list just displaying the tip of the iceberg, Babbit is one of the most prolific and talented directors in TV at the moment.
6 Dorothy Arzner
With the exception of Lois Weber (who released one movie in this time period), Dorothy Arzner was the only woman working as a director in the Golden Age of Hollywood. She has an impressive and large body of work, directing 21 movies from 1922 to 1943, spanning from the silent era into “talkies.”
Her movie Christopher Strong stars Katharine Hepburn as a pilot determined to break aviation records who falls in love with a married man. This relationship is just one example of the recurrent theme of unconventional love in Arzner’s movies which, arguably, were a way for her to express her own unconventional sexuality in her art. Arzner’s lifelong partner, Marion Morgan was a choreographer, and they worked together on movies such as Dance, Girl, Dance.
5 Chantal Akerman
Belgian director Chantal Akerman is a deeply influential and trailblazing director who worked from the 1970s up until her death in 2015. Akerman’s movies tend to reject traditional narrative structures and the requirement for action. Instead, she uses monotony and repetitive sequences to her advantage. This can be seen in her most famous work, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which examines the relationship between women and domesticity.
Writing for the British Film Institute, Laura Mulvey describes Jeanne Dielman as “inescapably a woman’s film, consciously feminist in its turn to the avant garde,” adding that “Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression, into a liberating force.”
4 Dee Rees
Dee Rees is an Oscar-nominated writer and director. Her first feature, Pariah, follows a teenager struggling to express her gender and sexuality in the way she really wants to in the face of homophobia. It’s a lovingly and successfully drawn coming-of-age portrait that filled a gap in the genre. Rees’ Bessie Smith biopic starring Queen Latifah earned four Emmy wins and a further eight nominations, including directing and writing nods for Rees.
Her following movie, Mudbound, followed two men dealing with racism in Mississippi following WWII. This movie earned Rees an Oscar nomination for her outstanding writing. She has a talent for creating empathetic portrayals of her subjects, allowing us a glimpse into their interiority without the overuse of exposition.
3 Alice Wu
Despite studying computer science at university, Alice Wu turned to a career in filmmaking after graduating. Her first movie, Saving Face, follows a mother and daughter who are both in unconventional relationships, the daughter with a woman, and her widowed mother pregnant despite not being remarried. Although it is primarily a comedy, Wu still includes insightful commentary on cultural expectations and traditionalist values.
Almost 20 years later, Wu followed up with The Half of It, an irresistibly charming loose adaptation of Cyrano. It follows a teenage girl who is hired to correspond with a jock’s crush on his behalf, and she eventually falls in love with his crush too. While Wu has only directed these two movies so far, they demonstrate incredible talent that we are desperate to see more of.
2 Céline Sciamma
Perhaps the most famous of the directors on this list is Céline Sciamma after the success of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. She is a writer as well as a director and wrote the screenplay for My Life as a Zucchini, which was then directed by Claude Barras. Much of Sciamma’s work takes an interest in gender and sexuality, such as Girlhood, Water Lillies, and Tomboy. These three movies also take a look at childhood and adolescence, which is a time ripe for emotionality and transformation.
Sciamma’s movies are incredibly well observed, particularly in relation to the hazy boundary between gender and sexuality which are often treated as entirely separate issues and experiences.
1 Rose Troche
Rose Troche is a prolific television director who has also released her fair share of feature films. Her first project, Go Fish, is a warm drama about the lesbian community in Chicago, co-written by Troche and Guinevere Turner, who coincidentally plays Cheryl’s love interest in The Watermelon Woman. Go Fish is smoothly done, blending comedy and deeper introspection, though it doesn’t get hung up on the latter, and established Troche as an exciting voice right off the bat.
In her work for TV, she directed episodes of Vida, Shameless, and Six Feet Under, as well as a significant chunk of The L Word.
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