Women's cinema is a cinema made by and for women and it deals with the being and the experience of women. It is not limited to a certain genre or artistic movement; it traverses historical periods and national boundaries; it consists of narrative and avant-garde, independent and commercial, documentary and fiction films. This course offers several critical and theoretical perspectives to discuss women's cinema while, at the same time, points out to some of the prominent debates about women's cinema within feminist film theory. We will discuss issues of historiography and canon, female auteurism, counter cinema and minor cinema, concepts of the female voice and body, women's cinema as world cinema and so forth. The primary objective of this course is to watch and discuss films by important female directors, well known or less, from early cinema until today. Among them: Alice Guy-Blaché, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, Lina Wertmüller, Maya Deren, Věra Chytilová, Agnès Varda,  Chantal Akerman, Jane Campion, Claire Denis, Kathryn Bigelow, Catherine Breillat, Andrea Arnold, Lucrecia Martel, Deepa Mehta, Nadine Labaki, Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf, Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi and others.