THE GIRLS

As they tour Sweden in a theatrical production of Lysistrata, performing to often uncomprehending audiences, three women find their own lives and marriages mirrored in Aristophanes’s play. Soon, onstage drama, offstage reality, and surrealist fantasies begin to collide.

Mai Zetterling’s lodestar of feminist filmmaking stars some of the finest actresses of Swedish cinema as rabble-rousing thespians inspired to change the face of the world. Simone de Beauvoir deemed it the best movie a woman had ever made (!)—and it remains as invigorating now as it was in the 1960s.