As a production student, video maker, and a woman, I’m enthralled when I find female filmmakers who have been successful in film – an industry that, quite frankly, hasn’t been so welcoming to ladies behind the camera.

In honor of Women’s History Month, I’ve decided to spotlight writer/director Lena Dunham, creator of the 2010 film Tiny Furniture and HBO’s hit series Girls.

After watching both her film and television series, however, I’ve realized that there’s much more to Lena Dunham’s filmmaking than just painfully real representations of young women on screen; her characters are ones that I identify with as both a “twentysomething” myself and a college student, soon to graduate.

Before her stint with the premium channel, Dunham proved her writing and directing abilities with her film Tiny Furniture, which garnered much attention, even earning Dunham the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay.

Tiny Furniture, which many regard as a prequel to Girls, follows Aura, a college grad, as she faces the struggle of personal and professional failures upon coming home from school.

Aura deals with her pretentious overachieving sister, her selectively inattentive mother, and finding a middle ground in keeping her friends from college and rekindling old friendships fizzled out by the distance of school.

I found this film to be hyper-realistic to the point of squirming discomfort. I am not a yet a college graduate, but I can empathize with Aura’s situation simply by remembering what it was like for my own sister to come back from school.

At one point, not so long ago, I was the pretentious overachieving kid sister, rubbing my high school successes in the face of someone who was simply too old and did not care enough to bite back. My parents’ focus was on me – picking a good college, setting a prom and graduation budget, getting me to and from practices. For a while, I think, my sister may have felt she no longer had a place in a house that had so easily kept going despite her absence.

Just as it happened for Aura and her family, played by Dunham’s real sister and mom, my family was able to get to a comfortably dysfunctional place where we could cohabitate as well as accept the differences age and distance had fostered.

I believe Dunham’s work of representing young women on screen is fantastically accurate and should get a bit more credit. If you haven’t watched either Girls or Tiny Furniture, I suggest you do. They’re available on HBO GO and Netflix respectively.