Most years, my film group conducts a poll amongst its members. In the past, we’ve determined our all-time favorite films of a particular genre (horror, documentary, animation) or other categorical distinction (remakes and sequels, foreign language, black-and-white.) For the first time, this year’s list is centered on people rather than films. One would think it a breeze to curate a list of just 25 or 50 directors; my original long list ended up past the 150-mark. We were allowed to include up to 100, which is what my ballot below has. The first 30 or so are the most important; the placement of almost anyone beneath is a little more arbitrary.
In curating my list, I thought about whom I’d most like to see on the group’s list which is chiefly why Agnes Varda ended up at #3 – French, female, equally adept at documentary and fiction, she’s the sort of revered talent (that might not necessarily be a household name) that the group was created to promote and highlight. I also wanted to talk up my favorite LGBT directors which accounts for half of my top ten. My first draft placed the ever-dependable, ever-unique Tsai Ming-liang at top but in the end, I couldn’t deny giving it to the artist I wrote my Master’s thesis in Film Studies on.
The thing with all-time-best-of lists is that they could credibly go on for days. What favorite filmmakers of yours missing from the 100 below would you have included?
- Derek Jarman
- Tsai Ming-liang
- Agnes Varda
- Paul Thomas Anderson
- Wes Anderson
- Robert Altman
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul
- David Lynch
- Todd Haynes
- Pedro Almodovar
- Michael Powell
- Guy Maddin
- Mike Leigh
- Atom Egoyan
- Claire Denis
- Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Sarah Polley
- Yasujiro Ozu
- Terence Davies
- Celine Sciamma
- Wong Kar-wai
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder
- Alfonso Cuaron
- Richard Linklater
- John Cassavetes
- Jane Campion
- Martin Scorsese
- Chris Marker
- Kelly Reichardt
- Zhang Yimou
- Joanna Hogg
- Andrey Zvyagintsev
- Jonathan Demme
- Werner Herzog
- Bob Fosse
- Abbas Kiarostami
- Andrea Arnold
- Spike Lee
- Jacques Tati
- Bong Joon-ho
- Edward Yang
- Joel Coen
- Andrei Tarkovsky
- Douglas Sirk
- Jean-Pierre Melville
- Hou Hsaio-hsien
- Michael Haneke
- Maya Deren
- Hayao Miyazaki
- Orson Welles
- Albert Maysles
- Jean-Luc Godard
- Michelangelo Antonioni
- Jim Jarmusch
- Kogonada
- Andrew Haigh
- Lee Chang-dong
- John Waters
- Jafar Panahi
- Buster Keaton
- Frederick Wiseman
- F.W. Murnau
- Nicholas Ray
- Sofia Coppola
- Joachim Trier
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Jean Renoir
- Ingmar Bergman
- Yorgos Lanthimos
- Krzysztof Kieslowski
- Whit Stillman
- Wiebke von Carolsfeld
- Xavier Dolan
- Fernando Eimbcke
- Marielle Heller
- Olivier Assayas
- Jia Zhangke
- Andrew Bujalski
- Josh and Benny Safdie
- Peter Strickland
- Lynne Ramsay
- Miranda July
- Roy Andersson
- Woody Allen
- Francis Ford Coppola
- Alexander Payne
- Leos Carax
- Robert Bresson
- Francois Truffaut
- Debra Granik
- Satoshi Kon
- Greta Gerwig
- Billy Wilder
- Preston Sturges
- David Cronenberg
- Ernst Lubitsch
- Stanley Kubrick
- Nicole Holofcener
- Howard Hawks
- Nuri Bilge Ceylan
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