Nina Menkes facts for kids
Nina Menkes (born 1955) is an independent filmmaker. Her films include The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983), Magdalena Viraga (1986), Queen of Diamonds (1991), The Bloody Child (1996), "Massacre (Massaker)" (2005), Phantom Love (2007), and Dissolution (2010). Dissolution (2010) was filmed in black and white and is set in Israel. Nina Menkes' sister Tinka appears as an actress in many of them. Menkes teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, California. She has donated copies of several of her works to the Academy Film Archive.
Life
Menkes was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan to European Jewish parents who fled Nazi persecution as children. She was raised in Berkeley, California. In 1977, she completed a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1987 completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California at Los Angeles. From 1985 to 1989 she taught in the film department of California State University, Northridge, and then, from 1990, at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita; she became an adjunct professor in film at the University of Southern California in the same year.
Work
Films by Menkes include:
- A Soft Warrior, 1981, an eleven-minute short
- The Great Sadness of Zohara, 1983, which was first shown at the Melnitz Theatre of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1984, and later in the same year at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and the Mannheim International Film Festival; also in 1984, it was awarded a special jury prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival and a silver medal at the Houston International Film Festival
- Magdalena Viraga, 1986, had its première at Film and Television Archives of the University of California, Los Angeles, and won the Best Independent-Experimental Film Award of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; it was shown at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal in both 1986 and 1987, and at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Whitney Biennial in 1987.
- Queen of Diamonds, 1990, had its first showing in January 1991 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and in 1992 was shown at the Munich International Film Festival. Tinka Menkes plays a croupier in a casino in the desert. It was restored by The Film Foundation and the Academy Film Archive in 2018, and was shown at the AFI Fest in November of that year.
- The Bloody Child, 1996, was based on a murder; it was the last film Menkes and her sister Tinka made together, and the last film she made for about ten years.
- Massacre (Massaker), 2005: camera, with co-directors Monika Borgmann, Lokman Slim, Hermann Theissen
- Phantom Love, 2007
- Dissolution (Hitparkut), 2010, was filmed in black and white and is set in Israel.
See also
In Spanish: Nina Menkes para niños
