21 Short Films by Women Directors

This guest post written by Film School Shorts appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Hopefully you’ve caught Film School Shorts on a PBS station near you. We’re a national half-hour weekly series that showcases short student films from across the country, and fortunately for us, the gender makeup of film schools is very different than that of Hollywood proper. Programs at AFI, Columbia, UCLA, NYU, and CalArts are full of women learning how to direct, write, produce, and animate their own films. Which means that when it comes time for us to pick shorts for our show, we have a lot of women-led films to choose from.

For Women’s History Month, we’ve put together a playlist of 21 of those films for your viewing pleasure. As you’ll see, no two of these shorts are alike. They deal with topics like autism, racism, sexism, losing a loved one and trying to fit in and find yourself at any age. And the women who’ve made them have gone on to do great things: Jules Nurrish, director of Kiss Me, was recently named a Film Independent Directing Lab Fellow. And you’ve probably heard of Ana Lily Amirpour, of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night fame; she also wrote I Feel Stupid, which was featured in our first season.

Our show gives us the opportunity to raise the profile of women-produced student work, and as Hollywood’s gender gap hopefully starts to shrink in the coming years, we expect to see our directors land bigger and bigger projects.

Check out all of the films in the playlist here: #ILookLikeAFilmDirector: 21 Shorts for Women’s History Month.

Film School Shorts is a national half-hour weekly series that showcases short student films from across the country. From quirky comedies to slice-of-life dramas to hard-hitting thrillers, emerging filmmakers offer new perspectives from a new generation.