Photo of Nina Menkes
Photo of Nina Menkes

Nina Menkes

“For me, cinema is sorcery, a creative way to interact with the world in order to rearrange perception and expand consciousness, both the viewers and my own.”

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    QUEEN OF DIAMONDS

    NINA MENKES United States, 1991

    Awash with striking imagery, Nina Menkes’s indelible portrait of alienated womanhood counters the glitz of nocturnal Las Vegas with its daytime loneliness. Sullenly glamorous, the blood-red claws sported by Tinka Menkes’s croupier evokes a gesture of resistance against the drudgery of casino life.

    PHANTOM LOVE

    NINA MENKES United States, 2007

    Surrealist objects set the stage and a menagerie of kindred animals curl and slither across it in Nina Menkes’s shadowy, monochrome fairytale. Numbed to loveless sex and pointless wars, Marina Shoif’s saturnine croupier abandons earthbound calls and levitates toward the ether for her liberation.

    THE GREAT SADNESS OF ZOHARA

    NINA MENKES Israel, 1983

    Drifting through transient terrains on foot and by train and boat, Nina Menkes’s hypnotic odyssey evokes unspoken feelings of exile and alienation through trance-like imagery. As the vagabond heroine, the enigmatic aura of her real-life sister Tinka Menkes strikes a powerful, autobiographical cord.

    THE BLOODY CHILD

    NINA MENKES United States, 1996

    Casting her spellbinding sister as an officer investigating a murder, Nina Menkes journeys into a sandstorm of military and sexual violence. Refusing resolution, this fascinating film excavates an atmosphere of haunting that is aswirl with dreamlike imagery and mesmeric incantation.

    MAGDALENA VIRAGA

    NINA MENKES United States, 1986

    An atmospheric fever dream unfurling over motel rooms and prison cells, Nina Menkes’s groundbreaking first feature traces the cyclical nature of exploitation. Simmering with rage, Tinka Menkes’s potent evocation of a fractured female psyche unveils the emotional ravage of transactional encounters.

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