Nina Menkes
Directing
Biography
Nina Menkes graduated with an MFA in film production from UCLA in 1989, has received Fulbright Research Awards to the Middle East and is a member of the film faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. Her films have screened at international festivals including Sundance, Cannes (ACID), Rotterdam, Locarno and Toronto. Her documentary Massaker, for which she was also cinematographer, premiered at the Berlinale and won the FIPRESCI Award. Her 1996 feature film The Bloody Child was selected as one of the best films of the past fifty years by the Vienna International Film Festival in Austria.
Known For
Investigates the politics of cinematic shot design, and how this meta-level of filmmaking intersects with the twin epidemics of sexual abuse/assault and employment discrimination against women, with over 80 movie clips from 1896 - 2020.
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
From the starting point of her admiration for the pioneering Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova (1934-2018), the director poses a question: is cinema made by women really tougher, more violent? Seeking answers, she talks to great contemporary filmmakers like Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, Alice Diop, Céline Sciamma, Ana Lily Amirpour, and Monika Treut, among others. It becomes obvious that the cinema screen is a space for the projection of real social problems and power relations.
No Mercy
Hitparkut (Dissolution) combines an almost surreal fairy-tale energy with brutal black and white realism to explore the condition of violence which permeates contemporary Israeli society. Shot is Yafo (the predominantly Arab area of Tel Aviv), the movie follows the moral collapse and first glimmer of redemption, of a young, morose Israeli Jew, played by Israeli actor Didi Fire
Dissolution
A surreal drama about an alienated family set in Koreatown, Los Angeles and Rishikesh, India.
Phantom Love
Story of A Red Sea Crossing. Shot in the bars and seedy hotels of East LA, this film is about the inner life of a prostitute imprisoned for killing her pimp.
Magdalena Viraga
A young, orthodox Jewish woman is alienated from her Jerusalem community and drawn into the world of spirit.
The Great Sadness of Zohara
This film was inspired by a real event—a young US Marine, recently back from the Gulf War, was found digging a grave for his murdered wife in the middle of the California Mojave.
The Bloody Child
Interviews with six of the mass murderers from Sabra and Shatilla. The faces are in black and are not identifiable.
Massacre
Firdaus is a Blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas landscape juxtaposed between glittering casino lights and the deteriorating desert oasis. Negotiating a missing husband and neighboring domestic violence, Firdaus’ world unfolds as a fragmented interplay between repetition and repressed anger.
Queen of Diamonds
"Sandy Ding's WATER SPELL is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure... and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not an easy film, but it is a powerful one." --Nina Menkes
Water Spell
Nina's first collaboration with her sister Tinka Menkes, the film documents, in a strange and beautiful way, a serious illness suffered by Tinka, and also expresses how art is a transformative response to life.
A Soft Warrior
A small girl's nightmare. Untitled No.1 is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmaker Nina Menkes).