Elisa and Marcela, Isabel Coixet (2019)

The Director Isabel Coixet turns a genuine love story of two Spanish women into an amazing cinematic masterpiece. The story is a real-life story of a Spanish lesbian couple from 1901, who tried to be together fighting with anything to separate them. Elisa Sánchez Loriga and Marcela Graciela Ibeas were two women who loved each other and got married with Elisa pretending to be a man. The couples only wished to live a peaceful life in the arms of each other was destroyed once again when their little lie exposed. The outrage of the little community they were hiding pushed them to run away. The couple runs to Portugal with plans of immigrating to Latin America, but nothing goes as they planned.

The director’s magnificent eye and the purity of the story are giving us a pure joy and heartbreak at the same time. Every scene is a photographic magnum opus.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma (2019)

Céline Sciamma has proved once again that cinema is a universe of art scene by scene. Sciamma makes us see a brand fresh face of the 18th century with a perfect romance. Marianne, an art tutor teaching her class and one of her paintings of a woman whose dress in flames in the middle of darkness takes us back in her time where she were to paint Héloïse, to send the painting to a nobleman with intentions of an arranged marriage. But Héloïse is a woman with no desire of a marriage, defeating one painter after another without even showing off her face until Marianne brought to her sight as a companion, not knowing she must paint her in secret. No surprise the tension grows between two women glancing at each other in peeping and turns the period romance into a mesmerisingly magical experience in two hours.

-Meleknur Gördegir

The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos (2018)

The Favourite is another great movie addition to Yorgos Lanthimos' name along with Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and many more. The film revolves around two cousins' Machiavellian rivalry to become the favorite of England's monarch, and it maybe is the best way to anachronistically represent the life of Queen Anne, away from the gloomy historical facts. Instead, the film skillfully draws audience for an eccentric character, witty dialogues, and irreverent humour that makes the film crucially modern. Lanthimos managed to successfully capture the chemistries between multi-layered performances of Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone; each having their finger in this deliciously chaotic pie. So, go check out this beautifully thematic, oddly funny film we know you will love too.

All about my mother, Pedro Almodóvar (1999)

"You are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being." Pedro Almodóvar's 1999 award-winning film pays homage to womanhood: framing with bright colours and wondrous queer characters. The film flawlessly crafts and transforms all the melodramatic events that has been carried out throughout the film with loads of irony and makes it palatable, and empathetic to the bone. It revolves around the idea of appearance versus reality when depicting all kinds of forms of being a woman and all the roles attributed to it. The plot tells a tragic story but gives out a great message as it mirrors the lives of women from challenging walks of life. Almodóvar's vibrant lens embraces various issues concerning identity, sex, gender performativity, religion through gay, transvestite and feminist narratives in the form of strong, autonomous women. By all means, watch it before you miss out on Almodóvar's talent in storytelling.

-Aydan Özcan