Nelly Kaplan's work has been marketed and promoted frequently as soft-core pornography, but that perhaps only illustrates the scarcity of strong women's voices in world cinema. That scarcity, extreme when Kaplan first began creating films, still exists at the beginning of the new millennium to an astonishing degree. Apprenticed to such dynamic and sensually open French filmmakers as Gance, Resnais, and Truffaut, Kaplan began her work as a director when the first stirrings of second-wave feminism were beginning to be felt. Her films, though often marketed under lurid advertisements, and given leeringly suggestive foreign titles, were most definitely a part of that movement.

That Kaplan's films are erotic is beyond question, but they are much more than pornography, and to dismiss them as such is to deny the woman's voice that speaks through her work. Kaplan's films are radical precisely because they are erotic and that eroticism is presented from the female point of view and speaks to the female audience. Though some have called her films anti-feminist because they are often blatantly sexual, many feminists have claimed her as a powerful spokesperson because she gives women a sexual voice.

Her first internationally famous film, A Very Curious Girl, tells the story of a...