Films directed by women: only 11% of 2024's 100 biggest US films

Women directed 11% of the 100 top-grossing US films of 2024, down from 14% in 2023, according to San Diego State University's yearly Celluloid Ceiling report. Across the top 250 films the share was 16% in both years.

The gap has a long history. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director on 7 March 2010, for The Hurt Locker, which also won Best Picture. Before her, only three women had even been nominated: Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola.

The eight films below are mostly outside the top 100, made in Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Romania, Canada and the United States. Each had a woman in the director's chair, one of them co-directed with a man, and each has a story behind it worth knowing before you press play.

What defines a film by a woman director

• A woman holds the director's chair. The director shapes the cast, the tone and the final cut. That is the credit counted here.
• The subject varies widely. These range from a care-home wish that became a space film to a newsroom run by village reporters.
• Many started small. Several were made independently, on borrowed locations and tight schedules.

Recent films by women directors to watch

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2024)

Hettie Macdonald, the British director of the 1996 film Beautiful Thing, made this after directing six of the twelve episodes of the series Normal People. Harold, a retired man, sets out on foot from Kingsbridge in Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed, near the Scottish border, to say goodbye to a dying friend. He believes the walk might keep her alive.

The story began as a BBC Radio 4 play by Rachel Joyce, who dedicated it to her father. He was dying of cancer and did not live to hear it. She turned it into a 2012 debut novel that was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, then wrote the screenplay herself. Filming began in Devon in September 2021 and moved across England in sequence, following Harold's route.

Comedy

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Revoir Paris (2023)

Alice Winocour, a French director whose earlier films include Disorder and Proxima, based this film on her brother's experience. He survived the 2015 attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, and she asked his permission to tell it. Mia, the film's lead, survived an attack on a brasserie and remembers almost nothing of that night, so she investigates, meeting other survivors.

Winocour shows the attack from Mia's single point of view, and Mia sees only the attackers' feet. She has said the film is not about the terrorists but about the traces of the trauma. Virginie Efira won the César Award for Best Actress for playing Mia. The film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2022.

Drama

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The Perfect Candidate (2020)

Haifaa al-Mansour is a Saudi director whose film Wadjda premiered at Venice in 2012 and was described as the first full-length feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. Because men and women were kept apart, she directed outdoor scenes from a van, using a monitor and a walkie-talkie. Cinemas were banned in Saudi Arabia for about 35 years, until 2018, and this film was backed by the newly created Saudi Film Council.

It follows a young doctor who runs in local elections, at first to pressure the authorities to pave the road to her clinic, and meets resistance from her family and community. It premiered on 29 August 2019 in competition at Venice. Saudi Arabia entered it for the Oscar for Best International Feature.

Drama

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Writing with Fire (2021)

Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh co-directed this documentary, which follows Khabar Lahariya, a newsroom run by Dalit women. Dalits are people long placed at the bottom of India's caste system. The outlet began in 2002 in Chitrakoot district, Uttar Pradesh, started by the Delhi nonprofit Nirantar. The film tracks its shift from print to digital, with reporters covering difficult regions on smartphones.

It premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award and a Special Jury Award for Impact for Change. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the ceremony held on 27 March 2022, and Scroll.in called it the first Indian documentary nominated in that category.

Documentary

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Off the Record (2025)

Kirsten Foe is a former stuntwoman who wrote and directed this, her feature debut. She has said that as a stuntwoman she often played victims in underwritten roles, which bothered her and pushed her to write characters herself. She has said the script grew from a New York Times article about women's experiences in the music industry.

Rainey Qualley plays Astor Grey, a rising singer-songwriter whose romance with a washed-up rock star, played by Ryan Hansen, turns into manipulation. Rebecca De Mornay is in the cast, with cameos by the guitarist Billy Gibbons and the former NFL players Peyton Manning and Edgerrin James. According to a Bleeding Cool interview, her department heads were largely women, and her cinematographer Em Michelle Gonzalez had spent years as a camera operator before getting the promotion.

Drama

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Nyctophobia (2024)

Seayoon Jeong is a Korean-American filmmaker who told Korea Daily she has worked on more than 30 films as a producer and director. She has said she feared the dark as a child, it faded, and it returned during the pandemic. That became Nyctophobia, the word for that fear.

Liz sleeps with the lights on, and each attempt to pass a blockade of clowns in her dreams leads to a different nightmare, including a jazz singer, a rag doll and a schoolgirl in a classroom of bloody mannequins. Jeong has said that with production shut down she used stock footage and whatever material she could obtain. Reviewers describe musical numbers and clowns in a mostly monochrome film with splashes of colour.

Drama

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Astronaut (2019)

Shelagh McLeod acted for nearly forty years, in British television such as Holby City. This was her first feature as writer and director. She got the idea while visiting her mother in a nursing home, where an elderly man in a wheelchair stared at the sky for hours. When she asked what he wanted, he said, "Another go."

The film was first planned for England and moved to Canada after she met the producer Jessica Adams. It was shot in Hamilton, near Toronto. McLeod said the team never expected to get Richard Dreyfuss: her agent raised his name, his agent read the script and started the process. Early drafts had a spacewalk, which she cut because she could not get a big budget for a first feature. It premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June 2019.

Drama

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Part-Time Daddy (2024)

This is the English title of the Romanian comedy Tati Part-Time, directed by Letitia Rosculet, who is known in Romania for the Pro TV series Profu' and Triplusec. She co-wrote it with the producer Matei Dima, known as BRomania. He has said the idea came from his fear of waking up to find a child at his door, and that it only became possible once he found the right child and the right writer-director.

Eva Maruta made her acting debut as Maya, the eight-year-old goddaughter, opposite Alex Bogdan as a lawyer. From the second week of filming Maruta handled her own continuity. Rosculet described the film as independent and privately financed. It opened in early January 2024 and topped the Romanian box office within a week, with more than 144,000 admissions in its first week according to cinemagia.ro.

Comedy

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Where to go next

• Cult classic movies that found their audience years late
• So bad it's good movies