Dazzling Discoveries: The Visible Lives of Women on Film in 2024

What lingers most from my year of going to the cinema in 2024 is not a particular image but an experience of time—or rather, several experiences of time as explored by filmmakers across the decades through a cultural and political inquiry into the intimate lives of women in various parts of Asia. This selection of films, many of which have been resurrected from obscurity through recent restoration, have been a dazzling discovery. The structures and shapes of storytelling diverge but what these films have in common is their dignified attention to women’s interiority and experiences as a way of thinking about the world.

Yoru No Kawa (Night River) | Kōzaburō Yoshimura | Japan | 1956

At the heart of Kōzaburō Yoshimura’s body of work is his outstanding sequence of films chronicling post-war social change in Japan through the lens of working women in Kyoto, the old capital city. Adapted from a novel by Hisao Sawano, Yoru No Kawa centres on Kiwa (Fujiko Yamamoto), a talented kimono designer who specialises in the craft of hand-dyed silks, her family trade. Her resolve to continue this traditional form of textile making even when most are abandoning it is an early sign of the choices she navigates in a society that is rapidly modernising but hasn’t wrestled itself away from the grip of tradition. In Kiwa we also see a portrait of an accomplished businesswoman and artist who makes and wears traditional clothes but doesn’t conform to societal expectations of a woman of her generation. Kiwa is confronted with the prospect of marriage as she is pursued by a number of unsuitable men until she falls in love with professor Takemura (Ken Uehara), a scientist with a terminally ill wife. The ethical dilemma she encounters in the course of this relationship and how she resolves it marks this as a film deeply interested in a vision of a world that centers women’s desires and agency. 

Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa imbues the film with textures and chromatic beauty that reflects how Kiwa sees the natural world. She has a penchant for wanting to capture it in fabric. Yoru No Kawa is Yoshimura’s first film in colour and though he was colour blind, he drew on theories of colour psychology to exploit the potential of the new medium. It is one of the most visually mesmerising films I have seen this year, particularly a twilight scene where the couple sit in a hotel room, their faces illuminated by an ochre glow and their silhouettes cloaked in dark shadow, only the sound of rain can be heard, filling in for all that is left unsaid.

Khak-e Sar bé Mohr (The Sealed Soil) | Marva Nabili | Iran | 1977

In Marva Nabili’s Brechtian tale, Roo-Bekheir (Flora Shabaviz), a young woman living in a village in southwest Iran follows a monotonous routine of domestic work: cooking in the house courtyard, tending to her younger siblings, and fetching water from the riverbank. Pressured to marry, she refuses all suitors, without providing any explanation. Rural life begins to see signs of change and the advent of new possibilities with a modern settlement being built on the other side of the road as a result of agricultural reforms. 

The earliest surviving Iranian film to have been directed by a woman, Nabili secretly shot Khak-e Sar bé Mohr while working on a miniseries for the state television network. Using a distant static camera, sparing dialogue and long takes, she embraces the idiom of a Persian miniature painting, in which the story is always depicted from a distance. This technique, which leaves much more to the interpretation of the spectator can feel at the same time distant and intimate. There is a sublime moment in the film when Roo-Bekheir finds release and pleasure undressing on a riverbank in the rain. Khak-e Sar bé Mohr is less a subversive protest and more a quiet reclamation of some semblance of autonomy, but is powerful all the same.

Screening at the Barbican in London in February 2025 – https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/the-sealed-soil-the-house-is-black-introduction

Bona | Lino Brocka | Philippines | 1980

Bona opens with a sweeping shot of a rapturous crowd of devotees gathering for a religious spectacle, the Feast of the Black Nazarene in Manila. The camera roams and fixes its gaze on the film’s eponymous protagonist Bona’s (Nora Aunor) face. We next see her as a star-struck spectator on a film set where she is particularly enamoured by an extra, the lanky Gardo (Phillip Salvador).. Filmed in 1980 by Lino Brocka, one of the Philippines’ most celebrated auteurs, Bona was considered lost for years after its negatives were destroyed in a fire. Now rediscovered and restored, it is a searing social critique holding a mirror to a society simmering in proletarian anger and tangled in relentless class struggles under the authoritarian rule of the Marcos dictatorship. Brocka sets up a parallelism between religious and celebrity devotion in Bona’s unconditional attachment to the narcissistic Gardo.

Bona is inseparable from its actress and producer, Nora Aunor—the first non-mestizo actor to rise to the rank of superstar, venerated by the working-class communities from whom she arose. Aunor’s spirited performance embodies the psyche of a woman trapped in idolisation but Aunor’s Bona is no martyr; instead she is simply human — fallible and obstinate. Even in her moments of self-subjugation, there’s a dignity to Bona that refuses to be diminished, making the final moments both a feminist awakening and a defiant political act.

India Cabaret | Mira Nair | India | 1985

For her third documentary India Cabaret, critically acclaimed director Mira Nair lived with a group of women cabaret dancers in Bombay for several months observing their lives. The trust that was cultivated between the filmmaker and her subject is reflected in the candour and intimacy of this captivating documentary. Nair takes the viewer in and out of dressing rooms of seedy bars, talking to the dancers, and some of the men who are enthralled by them. The women reflect on the demands of their jobs and their negotiating skills, their comfort in their bodies and their pride in making a living for themselves and their families.

Released at a time when the discourse around bar dancers as a profession was marred with judgement and moralising, India Cabaret is invested not just in exploring but rather exposing the hypocrisy of patriarchal notions of virtue. Nair is preoccupied with understanding the distinctions that divide ‘good women’ from so-called ‘bad women’ in Indian society and in whose interests these distinctions are perpetuated. The film also spotlights the men who go to see these women dance for their pleasure; who pretend to be happily married and who, when interviewed, have no qualms about passing judgment on the womens’ character.

The documentary looks at the gamut of the dancer’s experiences but never as victims of their circumstances: the meagre material conditions of their lives – living in tiny, rented rooms, the addiction to cheap liquor, the precarity of a career in which ageism is rife. Yet their lives are charged with the spark of freedom even if it comes at a cost; a freedom from enforced domesticity that is usually only granted to men in India.

The Woman Who Ran | Hong Sang-soo | South Korea | 2020

When her husband goes away on a business trip, a young woman Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) visits two friends whom she hasn’t seen in a long time and accidentally runs into a third woman – a past acquaintance she has a complicated history with. In each of this triptych of encounters, she explains that her husband (unnamed and unseen) prefers for them to be inseparable, and this trip marks the first time in five years of marriage that they have been apart even for a day.

The women engage primarily in extended dialogues on nothing and everything, swirling around appetites, artistry, the neighbourhood, and men. These conversations coalesce into idiosyncratic observations such as the beauty of cow’s eyes and also expose Gam-hee to the freedoms her friends have cultivated and a certain resignation to the strictures of her own life. 

Each of the three encounters have a sense of repetition and structural similarities, which is a Hong trademark. There’s always an offering of food, there’s always a self-important man who steps into the frame midway interrupting a conversation and there’s always some CCTV footage. By filming the women’s conversation in very long takes with panning shots and zoom-ins Hong is masterful in excavating the unspoken truths and details that percolate beneath the gleaming surfaces and genteel exchanges on questions of companionship and relationships, exploring how women in contemporary urban South Korea choose to live their lives and the bargains they make along the way.

Rida Bilgrami is a writer based in London. Her work spans poetry, essays and reported features with a focus on travel, books, visual culture and cities. Header photograph: still courtesy of The Women Who Ran.