Nina Menkes Retrospective In NY and LA

A truly independent filmmaker, Nina Menkes has been a prolific mistress of her craft for several decades. To honor her achievements, the Anthology Film Archives in New York and the UCLA Film Archives in Los Angeles will be partnering for a bi-coastal celebration of her films with a New York and Los Angeles career retrospective. Alongside showings of her past works, Menkes’s most recent feature, DISSOLUTION, will be playing the full week of the NYC retrospective. All six of her feature films will be screened, as well as a number of her celebrated shorts. Menkes produced, wrote, directed, shot and edited her own features, with her work show widely at major international film festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Locarno, London, Viennale, San Francisco, Edinburgh, Cairo, Toronto as well as at La Cinematheque Francaise, The British Film Institute, the ICA, the Beijing Film Academy, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and at other museums. The film program will feature her two early short films, A SOFT WARRIOR (1981) and THE GREAT SADNESS OF ZOHARA (1983), as well as the features MAGDALENA VIRAGA (1986), QUEEN OF DIAMONDS (1991), THE BLOODY CHILD (1996), MASSAKER (2004) and PHANTOM LOVE (2007). Her most recent film DISSOLUTION, loosely inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, is shot in modern-day Tel Aviv, and combines an almost surreal fairy-tale energy with brutal realism to explore the condition of violence which permeates contemporary Israeli society. Menkes is currently in development on a new feature, HEATSTROKE, executive produced by Gus Van Sant, and set to be shot in 2012 in Cairo, Egypt and Los Angeles.

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