Take Off
Filmmaker Gunvor Grundel Nelson (b. 1931) has been making what she calls “personal films” both in the Bay Area and in her birthplace of Kristinehamn, Sweden, since the 1960s. Her short Take Off is described by her distributor, Canyon Cinema, as “a dance, a documentary, [and] a metaphysical strip tease.”

Love and Anarchy
In 2019, prolific Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller (1928–2021) became the second female director ever to receive an Honorary Award from the Academy for her career, preceded only by Agnès Varda in 2017. Nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, her luxurious, grotesque, hilarious Love and Anarchy finds her longtime icy-eyed muse Giancarlo Giannini shacking up in a high-class brothel, biding his time before he attempts to assassinate Mussolini. Critiquing modern society by scrutinizing Italian gender roles through the faults and blunders of her male protagonists, Wertmüller places equal emphasis on sexual politics as she does on her staunch socialist ideals.