This is a story about a woman who is haunted by circling images, trapped in violence. She asks you to enter her experience and her search for release.” This text introduces viewers to an interactive world containing recontextualized fragments from each one of Menkes’s five films, each one starring her sister Tinka Menkes as a deeply alienated woman in powerful resistance against harsh, inhospitable landscapes. “Combining the bold visual language and aesthetic rigor of independent film at its best with the interactivity of new media, the CDROM enables players, as in dreams, to draw from a reservoir of highly charged, deeply connected images and sounds and to re-edit them with intriguing narrative twists. —ninamenkes.com
Menkes’s films have shown widely in major international film festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Locarno, London, Viennale, San Francisco, Berlin, Cairo, Toronto,as well as at La Cinematheque Francaise, The British Film Institute, the ICA in London, the Beijing Film Academy in China, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MOCA and LACMA in Los Angeles. Menkes’ many honors include a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Annenberg Foundation Independent Media Grant, an American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award, three Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowships and two Senior Fulbright Research Awards—one to the Middle East/North Africa, and one to India. In addition, her work has been listed on many periodicals “Top Ten Films of the Year” lists, including Film Comment and, repeatedly, The Los Angeles Times. Her feature length, experimental documentary… read more