The 100 greatest films directed by women

BBC Culture polled 368 film experts from 84 countries in order to find the best films from female filmmakers – here’s the top 100.

There was one stark statistic that jumped out from the results of last year’s BBC Culture poll to find the 100 greatest foreign-language films of all time: just four out of that 100 were directed by women. And the same paucity of female directors has been a feature in each of our annual surveys: in 2017’s poll of the 100 greatest comedies there were four. Twelve films from female directors made it into the 100 greatest films of the 21st Century in 2016, but none of those films featured in the top 20. And in our first poll of film critics, to find the 100 greatest American films – just two were co-directed by a woman.

So in 2019 we set out to focus the spotlight firmly on women directors. The result is BBC Culture’s biggest and most international poll yet: 761 different films were voted for by 368 film experts – critics, journalists, festival programmers and academics – who came from 84 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. We asked the same number of women to contribute as men to create a gender-balanced poll, with 185 female voters, 181 male voters, one non-binary person, and one who preferred not to say. Each voter listed their 10 favourite films directed by women, which we scored and ranked to produce the top 100 listed below.

The result is a stunning collection of films that demonstrates the power, creativity and diversity of cinema made by women around the world, from Lois Weber’s silent film Shoes (1916) – right up to 2019 highlights The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg) and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma). The majority of films on the list were made since the 1990s, and although the US, France, UK, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Canada were the most popular countries of production, films from Argentina, Iran, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, India, Tunisia and the Czech Republic all appear in the top 100. The late, great Agnès Varda was the most popular director overall, with six films in the top 100, followed by Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Denis, Lynne Ramsay and Sofia Coppola. Jane Campion’s masterpiece, The Piano (1993), was a worthy winner, with nearly 10% of critics placing it as the top film on their ballot. In her essay on the winning film, Hannah Woodhead praises its uniquely New Zealand sensibility and difficult, real female characters, in “a piercing fable that speaks to the universal desire to love and be loved”.

So what’s on the list? A film of a mute piano player rediscovering passion sits alongside the existential crisis of a Parisian girl-about-town; a subversive surrealist Czech comedy banned in its home country; three days in the life of a single mother in Belgium; repressed sexuality and jealousy in the French Foreign Legion and an odd-couple friendship between an ageing film star and a young graduate in a Tokyo hotel – and that’s just the top five. In the coming days, BBC Culture will publish a series of features that reflect on the results, the genius of women directors and the power of their storytelling. First of all, you can read more about the winning selection as international film critics argue why each film in the top 25 deserves to be there.

As ever, we don’t expect this list to be definitive but a starting point for discovery, discussion and debate. Tell us what you think – and what you think is missing – using the hashtag #100FilmsbyWomen on BBC Culture’s social channels. We hope you are as inspired by this list as we are; it’s a celebration of the brilliance and remarkable variety of filmmaking by women.

www.bbc.com/culture/story/20191125-the-100-greatest-films-directed-by-women-poll