This video was made as part of “One Hundred Movies Walk into a Bar…” – a collaborative videographic workshop organized by Ariel Avissar and Colleen Laird during the summer of 2025. The workshop was conceived as a collective response to The New York Times’ recently-published list, “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century.” Participants were prompted to treat this list as a generative provocation, inviting critique, remix, reflection, and play. The resulting pieces were diverse in tone and form, ranging from experimental collage to critical commentary, but all emerged through a shared process of communal creation, screenings, feedback sessions, and iterative revision. A selection of these is published here in 16:9, and the entire collection is curated here.
“All About Numbers: 100 Films – 11 Women” exposes a glaring missed opportunity. If anything shines in 21st-century film production, it is the remarkable presence of women filmmakers. Yet The New York Times’ list of the “100 Best Films of the 21st Century” includes only eleven films directed by women – and just one by a woman of color. This figure falls below the actual percentages of women directors in Hollywood, Europe, and even worldwide. This video essay lifts – visually and graphically – the curtain of discrimination to reveal what lies beneath, and provocatively envisions an alternative list composed entirely of films directed by women: my “100 Best Films of the 21st Century.”
Facts
16:9 is publishing six selected works form the collaborative videographic workshop “One Hundred Movies Walk into a Bar…” organized by Ariel Avissar and Colleen Laird during the summer of 2025.
“All About Numbers: 100 Films – 11 Women” by Barbara Zecchi (the current one, see above) is the third work in this series. Links to the rest will follow, when they get published during the next weeks:
- “See Under: Orient” by Colleen Laird.
- “Parasite and the Ones Below” by Wickham Flannagan.
- “All About Numbers: 100 Films – 11 Women” by Barbara Zecchi (current).
- “One Hundred (Lonely) Movies Walk Into a Bar” by Benedetta Andreasi.
- “Seen, Heard: Language Use in the ‘Best Movies’” by Jeffrey Romero Middents.
- “But What Do They Sound Like?” by Ariel Avissar.
