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Top 4 Movies of 2020 With Female Leads
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, Beanpole and Swallow: some of my favorite films of the year starring women
Click here to read in Portuguese | Clique aqui para ler em português
This year I watched fantastic films with one thing in common: they bring women as protagonists (with some directed and produced by women too). Cinema is, still, essentially masculine in most of its productions and protagonism on the screens. Throughout history, cinema has almost always been made by men and for men. The woman is often reduced to the good guy’s “final reward”, bearing stunning beauty … according to beauty standards, of course. In these productions, the woman’s narrative is not independent: it’s always associated with some male character trajectory.
While men watch themselves on the screen, women watch them being watched by men. This thinking is based on the words of art critic John Berger, who said in Ways of Seeing: “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and…
