BBC Culture reveals the 100 Greatest Films Directed by Women

With votes from 368 critics in 84 countries, are you ready to see who’s at number one?

BBC Culture have released their list of the 100 Greatest Films Directed by Women (#100FilmsbyWomen) and it contains a wonderfully wide-range of titles. This has been their most comprehensive international poll of film experts ever, with votes from 368 critics in 84 countries, are you ready to see who’s at number one?

The winning film is Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), which earned votes from a full 43.5% of participating critics! They voted for 761 different films in total. Agnès Varda was the most popular director in terms of number of films, with 6 films in the top 100, followed by Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Denis, Lynne Ramsay and Sofia Coppola. Varda also received the most individual votes.

“We are delighted to present BBC Culture’s biggest and most international poll of film critics yet of the 100 greatest films directed by women,” said BBC Culture editor Rebecca Laurence. “We were overwhelmed by the huge response, with 368 critics voting from 84 different countries. And we are pleased to report that this poll is gender-balanced, with slightly more female critics taking part than male. We hope, as ever, that this list will provoke debate and inspire discovery of the wonderful and diverse collection of films created by women throughout cinema’s history.”

The analysis shows that most of the top 100 films are from the 1990s and 2000s. The most popular years in the data are 1999, 2008 and 2017 with five films each. The United States, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Japan were most popular countries of production.