In Focus

Women filmmakers may still be few and far between, but their outsized impact is being felt this awards season

By Missy Schwartz
Photography by Davey James Clarke

Was 2024 a good year for women filmmakers? If you’re comparing it to 2023, when Greta Gerwig’s $1.4 billion-grossing Barbie redefined what a blockbuster can be, 2024 was always going to fall short, even with Dana Ledoux Miller co-directing Moana 2 (alongside David G. Derrick Jr. and Jason Hand), the No. 4 movie of the year. According to a report released by the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative in January, of the 112 directors responsible for the 100 highest-grossing movies of 2024, only 13.4% of them were women. That’s 15 people. Out of more than 100. Pretty bleak.

But box office isn’t everything. It never has been, especially for the kinds of personal, idiosyncratic works that care nothing for IP or quadrants—like “The Substance,” one of the year’s boldest, most discussed movies. An indie black comedy that uses body horror to critique, quite savagely, unattainable beauty standards for women, “The Substance” earned writer-director Coralie Fargeat Oscar, BAFTA, Critics Choice and Golden Globe nominations, in addition to the screenplay prize she won in Cannes. The movie debuted there last May and it has stayed in the cultural conversation ever since, earning its lead, Demi Moore, the type of respect she has said she never got during her ’90s heyday as a “popcorn actress.”

Fargeat is not the only woman whose singular point of view broke through in 2024. Just as “The Substance” embraces the horror genre to interrogate misogyny, Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch” (adapted from the Rachel Yoder novel) uses horror-fantasy to tell the story of an artist (Amy Adams) whose stay-at-home-mom identity crisis turns her into a dog. There is also Rose Glass’ ferocious “Love Lies Bleeding,” starring Kristen Stewart, which TheWrap’s rave review called a “bombastic spin on the crime drama genre” and a “fantastic companion piece” to Glass’ 2019 debut, “Saint Maud.” A stand-out in a similar genre is “Santosh,” the U.K.’s Oscar entry for international feature. Written and directed by Sandhya Suri, it’s a gripping, slow-burn noir in Hindi about a widowed policewoman investigating a young girl’s murder in Northern India.

Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” also takes place in India. An intimate look at female friendship and isolation in Mumbai, the film won the Grand Prix at Cannes, where it was the first film by an Indian director, male or female, to compete in the festival in 30 years. In “The Last Showgirl,” Gia Coppola also takes a delicate approach to a community of women, drawing an achingly beautiful performance from Pamela Anderson as a lifelong Las Vegas dancer who faces harsh consequences when she dares to age.

Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison, meanwhile, made her directorial debut with “The Fire Inside,” a fresh take on the sports drama starring Ryan Destiny as Claressa Shields, the boxer from Flint, Michigan, who won gold medals at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. The movie came out at the end of the year, alongside Halina Reijn’s erotic drama “Babygirl.” An exploration of a middle-aged CEO’s kinky fling with a younger man (Harris Dickinson), “Babygirl” was more critically divisive, but its star, Nicole Kidman, has earned near universal acclaim. She is at her most vulnerable in “Babygirl,” laid bare physically and emotionally, and she delivers her best work in years—which she has said would have been impossible without Reijn behind the camera.

So yes, we are still dreadfully far from parity when it comes to who gets to direct movies, but in 2024, these eight women beat the odds and shared their inimitable vision with audiences. We had the pleasure of photographing five of them.

Gia Coppola, “The Last Showgirl”

The granddaughter of Francis Ford and Eleanor Coppola (and niece to Sofia) was drawn to Kate Gersten’s script about a showgirl (Pamela Anderson) whose razzle-dazzle revue is canceled. “She had these characters that had so much history and were lovable and flawed,” Coppola said. “And it showed this journey of three different women going through a big change that says so much about our society and how women are pigeonholed.”

Halina Reijn, “Babygirl”

Born in Amsterdam, Reijn began her career as an actress, starring in films such as Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book,” before moving into writing and directing. Her English-language directorial debut, the 2022 mystery horror comedy “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. “Babygirl” premiered in Venice, where Nicole Kidman won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress.

Coralie Fargeat, “The Substance”

The French filmmaker followed up her 2017 debut feature “Revenge” with an audacious tale of self-destruction in which an aging actress (Demi Moore) takes a mysterious elixir that promises to restore her youth. The idea came to Fargeat when she was about to turn 50. “How I felt about my body, how my body was going to be judged … All this, I realized, had such a massive impact on my life and had generated a lot of self-hatred and violence towards myself.”

Payal Kapadia, “All We Imagine as Light”

In 2017, while Kapadia was still in film school in India, her short film “Afternoon Clouds” premiered in Cannes. It was the beginning of a fruitful relationship with the festival. She returned to the Croisette in 2021 with “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” which won the Golden Eye for best documentary feature, and again in 2024 with her first narrative feature, “All We Imagine As Light,” which was awarded the Grand Prix.

The first woman cinematographer to be nominated for an Oscar, Morrison related to Claressa Shields. “As a female boxer, she’s by definition the exception to the rule—which … I’m quite used to being as well,” Morrison said. “The idea that it’s not enough to be good at your craft, you also have to know how to look, how to act … I’ve had to walk that line, too.”

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