The film based on Julia Alvarez's popular novel about the three Mirabal sisters who fought and died for the overthrow of Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. With Salma Hayek as Minerva Mirabal and James Edward Olmos as Trujillo.

Hillary Swank and Frances O'Connor star as suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Frank, two voting rights activists turned radicals, fighting for the passage of the 19th Ammendment in the 1920s. Director Katja von Garnier loosens the reigns on historical accuracy and creates a film with a distinctly late-20th century feel.

Director Mary Harron's biopic of Valerie Solanas, writer of the SCUM (Society for Cutting up Men) Manifesto and the woman who pulled the trigger on artist Andy Warhol. Harron explores the sexism and misogyny of Warhol's Factory while retelling the events leading up to Solanas' paranoia-sparked act of violence.

An HBO film which tells three stories of three different women who lived in the same house in three different eras. Each woman (played by Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek and Anne Heche), faced with an unexpected pregnancy, must reconcile her situation with the abortion laws and social pressures of her time. The three independent stories serve as points on the time line of the history of abortion in the United States.

Peter Mullan's 2003 film shocked film-goers with its dramatized expose of the treatment of young Irish women forced to work in Magdalene Order laundries across the country. Based on true stories told to Mullan by survivors of these virtual prisons, the film focuses on the lives of four young women, sent away to earn penitence for their supposed sins, and the nun who terrorizes them.

Cicely Tyson stars as the fictional heroine of Ernest Gaines' 1971 novel, a 110 year former slave recounting her long life and in doing so, telling the history of African-Americans from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Movement. Tyson won two Emmy Awards for her performance in this 1974 television movie.

Julie Taymor (Tony Award winning director of The Lion King) directs Salma Hayek in this critically acclaimed movie about the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. From the bus accident that devastatingly injures her leg at the age of 18, through her political liberalism, her marriage to Diego Rivera to her death at the age of 47, Frida is a compelling and dazzling film, bringing Kahlo's life, loves and work to life on the big screen.

Tahmineh Milani contrasts the lives of two friends living very different lives in contemporary Iran. Roya and Fereshteh are university students in Tehran until an over eager suitor becomes a stalker and Fereshteh is abruptly recalled home by her family and placed in an abusive marriage. Roya remains in the city and her freedom only serves to remind Fereshteh what she has lost. Milani sets her film against the beginning of the Islamic Revolution and does not shy away from exploring the effect that post-Revolution Iran has on promising women like Roya and Fereshteh.

To her friends, neighbors and family, Vera Drake is a kindly housekeeper, a wife, mother and caretaker. But an accident brings the police to the Drake family home and Vera is arrested for performing illegal abortions. That Drake performs these abortions for free and as an act of generosity to the women who require them doesn't change the reality of her crime. Mike Leigh's critically acclaimed film explores the controversial topic of abortion while placing it in a framework of family and social mores.

Rob Marshall's epic film of the bestselling novel features an all-star cast: Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh, Ken Watanabe and Koji Yakusho. Beginning in the late 1920s, this film follows the young girl Chiyo as she is sold to a geisha house and put to work as a maid, to the eve of World War II when Chiyo, now known as Sayuri, has become an elegant and successful geisha.