BRAINWASHED is produced and directed by Nina Menkes
Stills from films by Nina Menkes, from left: The Bloody Child, Phantom Love, Magdalena Viraga, The Great Sadness of Zohara
“Awe-inspiring, Menkes creates rigorous works of art at the highest level.”
— Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
“Stanley Kubrick's confident statement - If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed - receives stunning confirmation with Nina Menkes.”
— Robert Koehler, Variety
“No less than David Lynch, Nina Menkes is an artist of the unconscious for whom the creative and the spiritual quest are one and the same.”
— Dennis Lim, The New York Times
“Pure Cinema at its best!”
— Elvis Mitchell, The Treatment, NPR
“Menkes has more to say about violence than any American director since Peckinpah and Cassevetes.”
— Phil Coldiron, LA Weekly
“Internationally recognised as one of our most audacious directors, Nina Menkes expands the cinematic form.”
— John Cooper, Sundance Film Festival
About Nina Menkes
Considered a cinematic feminist pioneer and one of America’s foremost independent filmmakers, Menkes has shown widely in major international film festivals including multiple premieres at Sundance, the Berlinale, Cannes (ACID), Rotterdam, Locarno, Toronto, The New York Film Festival, La Cinematheque Francaise, British Film Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA in New York, MOCA and LACMA in LA.
Menkes’s honors include a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an AFI Independent Filmmaker Award, a Creative Capital Award and an International Critic’s Award (FIPRESCI Prize) for the feature documentary Massaker which premiered at the Berlinale in 2005. In 2011, her feature film The Bloody Child (1996) was named one of the most important films of the past 50 years by the Viennale International Film Festival, Austria. In 2022 she was commissioned to create the official Viennale Trailer for the 60th Anniversary of the festival, along with other major directors including Claire Denis, Ryusuke Hamaguchi Albert Serra and Sergei Loznitsa.
Considered a cultural game-changer, her recent feature documentary BRAINWASHED: Sex- Camera-Power was made with support from Uncommon Productions, Susan Disney Lord, Abigail Disney, and the EOS World Fund.
BRAINWASHED has been honored with screenings at major international film festivals including Sundance, the Berlinale, CPH:DOX, BFI-London, IDFA, Ambulante, Frameline, Karlovy Vary and the Viennale, among many others, was named on multiple BEST OF 2022 and 2023 Lists including Film Comment, IMDB, Roger Ebert, Screen Slate, The Guardian, NPR, Sight & Sound Magazine and The Association of Women Film Journalists who also cited the film as an “Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the FIlm Industry”.
Two of Menkes’s early feature films, Queen of Diamonds and The Bloody Child, both starring Tinka Menkes, were selected for restoration by the Academy Film Archive and Scorsese’s Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Queen of Diamonds was widely hailed as “a modern masterpiece” when it was re-released in 2019, and a box set of all her narrative features is due out in late 2022, by Arbelos Films. In 2023, Queen of Diamonds was selected as a historically and culturally significant film and inducted into the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
Menkes (b. 1963) holds an MFA in Film Production from UCLA (1989), is a directing member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is a member of the faculty at California Institute of the Arts.
For further information & filmography, visit ninamenkes.com
