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SOME OF OUR GREAT PRESS FOR “Brainwashed”!

March 5, 2022

BRAINWASHED; SEX-CAMERA-POWER

OFFICIAL SELECTION: SUNDANCE 2022/BERLINALE 2022/CPH:DOX 2022

Running time 107 minutes/color/2022

SELECTION OF OUR GREAT REVIEWS!

 

“Nina Menkes’ eye-opening documentary will forever change how you look at films.”

— INDIEWIRE, Kate Erbland

 

 

“Menkes is a real no-bullshit breath of fresh air. With a torch. And with any luck, she’s heading your way to set fire to something, soon.”

–SCREEN DAILY, Finn Halligan

 

 

“Accessible, engrossing, urgent, and horrifying…It should be shown at film festivals, in classrooms, in boardrooms; It should be projected onto a building and played on a loop in Studio City.”

— THE PLAYLIST, Lena Wilson

 

 

“Nina Menkes is going to change the world…Brainwashed is one of the most important films anyone can watch right now!”  

—JOEY SOLOWAY, Producer/Director/Writer

 

 

“Explosive [and] compelling…“[Menkes] pulls off the tricky balanceof making Brainwashed digestible and illuminating for the casual cinema-goer while being stimulating and paradigm shifting for fellow filmmakers and scholars of film.”

–THE QUEER REVIEW, James Kleinman

 

 

“Menkes gives a persuasive, sometimes nightmarish sense of the leering perspectives found across much visual media….What’s most important is how we can act on [the film’s] prescriptions—if it’s not too late.” 

—THE FILM STAGE, David Katz

 

 

“The disruption of traditional power that “Brainwashed” puts forward to the language of cinema is compelling and progressive; it presents a much needed challenge for all filmmakers to find truer ways to depict who we are as people.” 

—Isaac Chung, Director of MINARI

 

 

“Subversive!…Menkes is not afraid to take on the film canon, and the directors hailed as the gold standard.”

–FILM THREAT, Ray Lobo

 

 

MORE INFORMATION AT www.brainwashedmovie.com

New doc feature ‘BRAINWASHED’ invited to the BERLINALE 2022!

December 25, 2021

SUPER THRILLED TO SHARE THAT OUR NEW FEATURE DOC “BRAINWASHED: SEX CAMERA POWER”  has been invited to the Berlinale 2022 in the Panorama section! This additional accolade, coming after the Sundance invitation, makes us feel that the film, indeed, is carrying a message of international importance. Go Team Brainwashed!

Poster designed by Natalie Gooden

WORLD PREMIERE OF ‘THE BLOODY CHILD’ @NYFF 2021!!!

October 12, 2021


It was a stunning experience to present “THE BLOODY CHILD” at Lincoln Center in NYC for the 2021 New York Film Festival. Great Gratitude to Mark Toscano at the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation for their immaculate restoration of this work, to distributors Arbelos Films, to programmers Dennis Lim, Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan.  “The film is as radical today as when it was made…Menkes is one of America’s most important film directors.”— Dennis Lim, October 2021.

BRAINWASHED in THE NEW YORK TIMES: 5 Female Directors Reject the Male Gaze

March 9, 2020

‘International Women’s Day arrives Sunday on the heels of another season of #OscarSoMale and another prize for the director Roman Polanski, who fled the United States in 1978, after he was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor.

And yet, there are bright spots. “I went to see ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ yesterday,” said the filmmaker and CalArts film professor Nina Menkes, “and there were trailers for three other films by women. It’s impossible! It’s the first time anything like this has happened in my life.”

Menkes is the creator of “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression,” a lecture and clip show she has been staging at film festivals around the world. In it, she uses scenes ranging from Hitchcock’s 1946 “Notorious” (1946) to Sofia Coppola’s 2003 “Lost in Translation” (with its opening shot of Scarlett Johansson’s barely clad backside) to demonstrate the nuances of objectification, the male gaze and how it’s perpetuated.

And not just by men. “I’ve had women students come in and show footage that begins on the woman character’s face,” Menkes said, “then for no apparent reason it cuts down to her low-cut shirt. And goes lower. And then back up. And I’d say, ‘Why did you film that way?’ And there’d be this deer-in-the-headlights look. They were doing what they’d seen a million times. And weren’t even aware of it. Heterosexual male actors are almost never filmed that way.”

Right now there’s a surge in cinema made by women — not just “Portrait,” but also recent and forthcoming movies like “Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey,” “The Assistant,” “Lost Girls,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “Zola” and Menkes’s documentary “Brainwashed.” I spoke to the directors to find out how they have been incorporating Menkes’s lessons into their work.’

By John Anderson, March 6, 2020

Read the full article HERE