Women and people of color were rarely nominated for best director or best picture categories in the movie industry, sparking frequent criticism. This was particularly true with the Oscar. It was considered an historic breakthrough when Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director for “The Hurt Locker” in 2010. No woman has won since.
The chance for women to produce and direct movies has expanded as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Apple have each become their own studios. 24/7 Tempo reviewed the four movies directed by women in the 250 top-rated full-length feature films on online entertainment database IMDb.
Women will be nominated for top honors, almost certainly, because the rate at which the industry releases films has quickened due to this increase in the number of films produced each year by these new streaming services.
That is about the future and not the unfortunate 100 years or more of movie production and directing dominated almost exclusively by men. Here is who won the Oscar for Best Director every year since 1929.
A good measure of how few chances women have had to create high quality major motion pictures is a review of the IMDb 250 Top Rated Movies. IMDb has been a gold standard for movie and television research since it was founded in 2007. Only four of the movies on the list had female directors.
Click here to see the four movies in IMDB’s Top 250 directed by women
A Silent Voice: The Movie (2016)
> Director: Naoko Yamada
> Rank in IMDB top 250: 169 (49,940 votes)
> Gross: N/A
A young man is shunned by his classmates after he bullies a deaf girl and her family moves away. The tormentor becomes tormented in the course of the film as his fellow students and teachers turn against him because of his cruelty. Both the girl and the bully go through periods of deep depression before they become friends near the end of the film.
Director Yamada, and “A Silent Voice: The Movie” have three distinctions. The first is Yamada’s gender. The second is that she is not an American filmmaker. And the third is that “A Silent Voice” is an animated movie, a rarity on the IMDb list. The Guardian wrote: “It’s a beguiling film: subtle, sensuous and delicate.”
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Capernaum (2018)
> Director: Nadine Labaki
> Rank in IMDB top 250: 143 (64,706 votes)
> Gross: $1.7 million
While serving a five-year sentence for a violent crime, a 12-year-old boy has to deal with the death of his sister due to what he believes is negligence on the part of his parents, and his own misfortune which he also believes is their fault. He sues his parents
Capernaum is the highest grossing Arabic movie of all time. Directed by Lebanese born Labaki, it was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category for the 2019 Academy Awards. A.O. Scott of the New York Times wrote, it is “a sprawling tale wrenched from real life, goes beyond the conventions of documentary or realism into a mode of representation that doesn’t quite have a name.”
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Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
> Director: Céline Sciamma
> Rank in IMDB top 250: 79 (66,050 votes)
> Gross: $3.8 million
Based in the period near the end of the 18th Century, a female painter paints a wedding portrait of a young woman. The two have an affair,
The National Board of Review picked it as among the top five foreign language films of 2019. Critic Roger Ebert wrote of the movie: “is its own, wondrous, magnificent thing; a complete artistic vision where every directorial step is refined and each thematic probe, seamlessly weaved in.”
The Matrix (1999)
> Director: Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski
> Rank in IMDB top 250: 21 (1,687,861 votes)
> Gross: $171.5 million
The Matrix is the first film in a trilogy, which includes The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions each of which was released in 2003. They are among the highest grossing science fiction films of all time with a combined domestic box office gross of $592,370,339.
The premise of the film is that reality as humans understand it, is nothing more than a simulation created by machines. The quest of the characters is to discover whether, if the machines are eliminated, humankind will be along with them.
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