Celebrating Women’s Month through film

August is “women’s month” and while it’s seen by many as a form of tokenism that helps to assuage the guilt of empty promises, rather than a genuine means of addressing the myriad terrible and often lethal challenges that still face women in the democratic era, it does provide an unneeded but timely reason to celebrate the long and influential contribution of women to cinema over the course of its history.

From the beginning of cinema in the late 19th century through to the golden age of Hollywood in the post-war 20th century and into the 21st, women have made groundbreaking and singular films across every genre that have too often been sidelined or overlooked by a still overwhelmingly male-dominated industry.

With the recent awards success of female directors in Hollywood like Chloe Zhao, Jane Campion and Greta Gerwig — whose Barbie just became the first film directed by a women to make $1bn at the global box office — this week’s column highlights three films made by very different women from very different places and in different eras across cinema history, that stand on their own merit as distinctive contributions to the art of the movies.   

The arthouse essential: Sambizanga – Mubi.com

Fiery political artist and activist Sarah Maldoror was born in France in 1929, the daughter of immigrants from the French West Indian island of Guadeloupe. She studied theatre in Paris and then film in Moscow, where she met and was influenced by the legendary Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. After completing her studies she served as an assistant director on Gillo Pontecrevo’s legendary political classic The Battle of Algiers.

Married to Angolan activist and founding member of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Mário Coelho Pinto de Andrade, Maldoror emigrated to Angola, where in 1972 she and Andrade collaborated on this deeply committed political drama based on the novel by Portuguese-Angolan author Luandino Viera.

The war against the Portuguese was still under way when the film was shot in Republic of Congo, which doubled on screen for Angola, where it was only shown after impendence in 1974.

Intended not so much for Angolan audiences but mainly as a vehicle to rally support for the cause of the MPLA internationally, the film is widely held to be the first Sub-Saharan African film directed by a woman.

The drama is set in the Luanda neighbourhood of its title, the site of a notorious prison where many liberation fighters were tortured and killed. When anti-colonial activist Domingos Xavier is arrested by the colonial authorities, he’s taken to the Sambizanga prison where he is tortured and threatened with death by his interrogators. While he is there, his wife Maria travels across the city looking for her husband whose involvement with the liberation movement has been kept secret from her.

Echoing the experiences of many colonial societies in the years before their independence and SA’s own brutal history of tortures, disappearances and interrogations under apartheid, Maldoror’s film, by centring the experience of its female protagonist and using a strikingly classical visual palette and sensibility remains a pivotal piece of political cinema that still resonates, long after the war at its centre has ended. It’s also a powerful tribute to the resilience of the liberation movement and the courage of the Angolan people during their long and brutal struggle for freedom.

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The stone-cold classic:

The Hitch-Hiker – YouTube

UK-born actor Ida Lupino is regarded as a feminist pioneer of Hollywood’s golden age. Not only did she establish herself as a star but she also directed several films through the establishment of an independent production company during the height of studio power in Hollywood, making her the most prominent female director of her era, decades before the industry finally opened its doors more widely to women behind the camera.

The Hitch-Hiker, from 1953 is regarded as the first US film-noir to be directed by a women and its notable for its tense, claustrophobic atmosphere and tight plotting and direction, which make it a standout example of the genre on its own terms. It’s also the film that any worried parents can timelessly turn to as evidence for why they don’t want their children to hitch-hike or pick up hitch-hikers.

Loosely based on a real-life killing spree conducted by Billy Cook in the early 1950s, the film follows two friends as they drive through Southern California on their way to enjoy a fishing trip in Mexico. In good spirits they generously decide to pick up a hitch-hiker who soon turns out to be a very bad guy and takes them hostage, forcing them to drive him to a point on the Gulf Coast Peninsula from where he can take a ferry to escape justice.

Using the barest of resources and setting the majority of the action inside a car, Lupino builds the thriller to terrifying heights of tension, while still managing to quietly insert some hard-hitting critiques of the socially expected roles enforced by the patriarchy in a film that’s occupied entirely by men.

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The diamond in the rough:

Women Talking – Prime Video

Director Sarah Polley’s drama, based on the book by Marion Toews won Polley an Oscar for best adapted screenplay in 2023 and as a film, it does a lot of what its title promises. The drama is all in the dedicated, impassioned and provocative debates that the fearsomely impressive ensemble cast conduct for most of the film’s running time, rather than in representation of the terrible actions of the story’s mostly absent men.

In 2010, on a remote rural religious sect’s farm, the female members of the community are brought together by an urgent need to make a tough decision about whether they should remain and stay true to the tenets of their faith or whether the crimes of their male oppressors should finally force them to leave their sheltered world behind for the sake of themselves and their children. As the film’s tagline so effectively puts it, the choices are: “Do nothing. Stay and fight. Or leave,” and the difficult conversations that ensue all unpack these options as the clock ticks.

Thanks to an excellent script and powerhouse performances from its stellar cast, the film manages to convey the tense dramatic thrills of the situation of its characters without resorting to gruesome visual demonstration of the obviously horrific actions of the men. The very act of providing space for these debates between women on screen becomes in itself a powerfully effective political statement against the all-too-long prevailing practice of shutting out their voices and experiences.

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