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.”
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.”
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.”
The New York Times
“Pure Cinema at its best!”
The Treatment, NPR
“Menkes has more to say about violence than any American director since Peckinpah and Cassevetes.”
LA Weekly
“Internationally recognised as one of our most audacious directors, Nina Menkes expands the cinematic form.”
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 Tim Disney,, 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”.
In conjunction with the release of BRAINWASHED, Menkes was honored with major career retrospectives at the BFI-London, the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles and BAM in New York as well as streaming tributes on MUBI and the Criterion Channel where she was described as ““a pioneer of feminist cinema, a visionary artist, and one of the great cinematic radicals of our time.”
Menkes’s early films 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, Menkes’s radical feature about a blackjack dealer (played by Tinka Menkes), was widely hailed as “a modern masterpiece” and a blu-ray box set of all her narrative features was released by Arbelos Films in 2022. The following year 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 holds an MFA in Film Production from UCLA. She is a directing member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and has taught at leading film schools including USC School of Cinematic Arts, CalArts and the FTII in India.
For further information & filmography, visit ninamenkes.com
