The previous chapters have discussed various aspects of Beauvoir's philosophy of ambiguity and their role in determining her existential ethics, suggesting that the emotional turbulence that results from ambiguity holds specific significance for a phenomenology of film experience. Using selected films of independent women filmmakers (Cavani, Granik, Dunye and Denis), I have outlined how their respective films exemplify Beauvoir's existentialist ethics as involving the following: 1) the need for reciprocal recognition to enable moral freedom; 2) the significance of emotional experience in our relations with others; 3) a questioning of habit in our manners of perception; 4) the systemic assumptions they maintain; and 5) the role of bad faith in love. These features illuminate how Beauvoir's existential phenomenology offers new ways of thinking about the importance of emotional indeterminacy within the context of cinematic experience. Her specific conception of ambiguity, when considered in terms of film experience, serves to recognise how effectively independent women filmmakers investigate the emotional turbulence within contingent existence, shedding particular light on women's lived experience.

But where to from here? Can Beauvoir's notion of ambiguity continue to be relevant for the twenty-first century within the shifting parameters of womanhood, taking into consideration the polemics of identity politics that exist within the related disciplines of feminism, feminist philosophy and film studies? Can her ethics of ambiguity be satisfactorily developed in line with its initial project, and extended to include reflective thinking on our current state of being on ethical and inclusive terms for the purpose of cinematic experience? The aim of this chapter, and for those that remain, is to consider the ways in which Beauvoir's philosophy of ambiguity can be put in closer conversation with current feminist phenomenologies. Beauvoir's philosophy, while ground-breaking, was of a different time, and despite her acknowledgement of the emotional and affective tensions common to everyday existence and their connection to the pursuit of moral freedom, to answer the questions posed above, this chapter engages with other feminist phenomenologists whose work attends much more to multiplicitous lived experience in diverse and global situations. Here, I reflect on Beauvoir's Eurocentrism and engage with other phenomenologies of ambiguity, and look toward an example of cinema that acknowledges ambiguous lived experience but which also critiques Eurocentric or colonialising world views, advancing more inclusive perspectives on freedom.