Every year the Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film selects a category and asks its membership to submit their favorite top films. The group’s previous year-end topics have included Best Musicals, Best Sequels and Remakes, and Best Black and White Films. This year, for 2022, the membership decided to pivot its focus: we present Chlotrudis’ take on the 100 Favorite Film Directors.
Among the best directors selected by Chlotrudis members, almost half were from non-English speaking countries (45%). 20% of the selections on the list were directed by women, and 2 of them, Agnes Varda and Sarah Polley cracked the Top 20. Among the 38 American directors selected, 3 were African-American: Spike Lee, Dee Rees and Jordan Peele.
To create this list, members were asked to come up with ranked lists of their favorite directors. After receiving all of the lists, numerical values were assigned to each of the rankings, and each movie was given a point total. Scores were weighted according to the number of viewers who had see the film, and ties were resolved by consideration of the number of lists a movie appeared on, followed by the highest ranking that movie reached.
This was an exciting, if at times maddening, list for members to compile. There were many, many drafts, as different iterations jogged memories and forced people to re-arrange rankings. We hope the following list provides as much lively conversation for your and your friends as it did the Chlotrudis members!
We hope you enjoy our list of our 100 Favorite Directors!
OUR FAVORITE DIRECTORS
| 1 | Robert Altman | USA |
| 2 | Mike Leigh | UK |
| 3 | David Lynch | USA |
| 4 | Todd Haynes | USA |
| 5 | Akira Kurosawa | Japan |
| 6 | Paul Thomas Anderson | USA |
| 7 | Hirokazu Kore-eda | Japan |
| 8 | Zhang Yimou | China |
| 9 | Alfred Hitchcock | UK/US |
| 10 | Billy Wilder | US |
| 11 | Asghar Farhadi | Iran |
| 12 | Stanley Kubrick | UK |
| 13 | Werner Herzog | Germany |
| 14 | Atom Egoyan | Canada |
| 15 | Pedro Almodóvar | Spain |
| 16 | Wes Anderson | USA |
| 17 | Sarah Polley | Canada |
| 18 | Martin Scorsese | USA |
| 19 | François Truffaut | France |
| 20 | Agnes Varda | France |
| 21 | Ingmar Bergman | Sweden |
| 22 | Spike Lee | USA |
| 23 | Orson Welles | USA |
| 24 | Wong Kar-Wai | Hong Kong |
| 25 | Jane Campion | Australia |
| 26 | Nicole Holofcener | USA |
| 27 | Ethan & Joel Coen | USA |
| 28 | Tsai Ming-liang | Malaysia |
| 29 | Michelangelo Antonioni | Italy |
| 30 | Jim Jarmusch | USA |
| 31 | Jean-Luc Godard | France |
| 32 | John Waters | USA |
| 33 | Andrea Arnold | UK |
| 34 | John Cassavetes | USA |
| 35 | Woody Allen | USA |
| 36 | Claire Denis | France |
| 37 | Ang Lee | Taiwan |
| 38 | Céline Sciamma | France |
| 39 | Joanna Hogg | UK |
| 40 | Francis Ford Coppola | USA |
| 41 | Michael Haneke | Austria |
| 42 | Bong Joon-ho | South Korea |
| 43 | Andrei Tarkovsky | Russia |
| 44 | Alfonso Cuarón | Mexico |
| 45 | Derek Jarman | UK |
| 46 | Kelly Reichardt | USA |
| 47 | Mira Nair | India |
| 48 | Hayao Miyazaki | Japan |
| 49 | Roman Polanski | France/Poland |
| 50 | Sofia Coppola | USA |
| 51 | John Sayles | USA |
| 52 | Federico Fellini | Italy |
| 53 | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | Thailand |
| 54 | Peter Weir | Australia |
| 55 | Richard Linklater | USA |
| 56 | James Ivory | UK |
| 57 | Debra Granik | USA |
| 58 | Xavier Dolan | Canada |
| 59 | Buster Keaton | USA |
| 60 | David Cronenberg | Canada |
| 61 | Carl Theodor Dreyer | Denmark |
| 62 | Howard Hawks | USA |
| 63 | Olivier Assayas | France |
| 64 | Rainer Warner Fassbinder | Germany |
| 65 | Wiebke von Carolsfeld | Canada |
| 66 | Maya Deren | USA |
| 67 | Kogonada | USA |
| 68 | Jean Renoir | France |
| 69 | Kathryn Bigelow | USA |
| 70 | David Fincher | USA |
| 71 | Dee Rees | USA |
| 72 | Patricia Rozema | Canada |
| 73 | Nuri Bilge Ceylan | Turkey |
| 74 | Bernardo Bertolucci | Italy |
| 75 | Chris Marker | France |
| 76 | Yorgos Lanthimos | Greece |
| 77 | Lisa Cholodenko | USA |
| 78 | Hou Hsiao-hsien | Taiwan |
| 79 | Hal Hartley | USA |
| 80 | Jordan Peele | USA |
| 81 | Mike Nichols | USA |
| 82 | Sergei Eisenstein | Latvia |
| 83 | Quentin Tarantino | USA |
| 84 | Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger | UK |
| 85 | Steven Soderbergh | USA |
| 86 | Sergio Leone | Italy |
| 87 | Jacques Demy | France |
| 88 | Fritz Lang | Germany/US |
| 89 | Gillian Armstrong | Australia |
| 90 | William Friedkin | USA |
| 91 | Robert Eggers | USA |
| 92 | Christian Petzold | Germany |
| 93 | F.W. Murnau | Germany/US |
| 94 | Albert Maysles | USA |
| 95 | Todd Field | USA |
| 96 | Jafar Panahi | Iran |
| 97 | Park Chan-wook | South Korea |
| 98 | Lynne Ramsay | UK |
| 99 | Edward Yang | Taiwan |
| 100 | Terence Malick | USA |