A pioneer in American Independent Cinema, Bette Gordon is known since her first works, Empty Suitcases (1980) and Variety (1984), for her bold explorations of themes related to sexuality, violence and power.


A part of the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes along with Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise in 1984, Variety (from her own original screenplay) is an original and beautifully seductive film about voyeurism and pornography from a female perspective, “a unique feminist thought experiment that doubles as a love letter to Fear City-era New York”  and established many of the themes that would show up again later in Gordon’s work. “For better or worse, I tend to be drawn to things that are maybe not easy to make, but you can’t really forget them,” she says. “I think all of my films are kind of haunting in some way, and if you can’t get them out of your head it means that I couldn’t get them out of my head either.”


Her most recent film, The Drowning, opened earlier this year in the US.