Movies: Nina Menkes

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....

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 b...

A surreal drama about an alienated family set in Koreatown, Los Angeles and Rishikesh, India....

A young, orthodox Jewish woman is alienated from her Jerusalem community and drawn into the world of spirit....

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 mo...

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....

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....

Interviews with six of the mass murderers from Sabra and Shatilla. The faces are in black and are not identifiable....

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)....

"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 i...

A short documentary about cinematic gaze featuring interviews with women in the film industry....

The filmmaker works with material that was created twenty years ago during a trip to India, and which is now seeing the light of day after all. From her own found footage emerges, hypnotically, the image of the lioness - entirely in keeping with this...

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....