Cleo from 5 to 7

Why this film belongs here

A nuanced study of loneliness and feminist subtext set within late-19th-century Bengali elite culture, this is Ray's most interior film — a lonely wife of a newspaper editor falls in love with her visiting cousin-in-law, who shares her love for literature. Like Varda, Ray trusts long held shots of his actress's face to carry meaning no dialogue states outright; both films are studies of a woman's intelligence with nowhere sanctioned to go.

Why this film belongs here

An intense study of Partition trauma, refugee life, and social breakdown centered on a relentlessly self-sacrificing daughter supporting her ungrateful family, rendered through searing imagery and an extraordinary central performance from Supriya Choudhury. Where Varda's Cleo fears her body is being read and consumed by Paris, Ghatak's Neeta is consumed quite literally by her family's survival — both are portraits of women whose interior lives are sacrificed to everyone else's narrative about them.