One of the great independents of American cinema, Kelly Reichardt has a relatively small body of work compared to most of her contemporaries, but practically every single one of her films is an essential piece of the last 20 years of indie filmmaking.
That's something that definitively cannot be said for the majority of other directors in her scale, since, too often, the constraints of low-budget filmmaking are used as an excuse for lack of ambition, both in storytelling and especially on a formal level. Reichardt's work is the best rebuttal to that: no matter how small the stories she tells, thematically they always contain the scope of a world's worth of humanity; and visually, with each new film, she has truly become one of modern cinema's greatest formalists.
A towering filmography that deserves constant celebration, and hopefully one this list will encourage the reader to know a little better.
