Nina Menkes' QUEEN OF DIAMONDS, Gets New Restoration At BAM

From Friday, April 26 through Thursday, May 2, BAM presents a brand-new restoration of Nina Menkes' radical, feminist feature, Queen of Diamonds (1991). Menkes will appear in person following the 7pm screening on April 26; she will also present her celebrated talk Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression with a Q&A, following the 4pm show on April 27.

In one of the most jarringly original independent films of the 1990s, a disaffected blackjack dealer (played by the director's sister Tinka Menkes) drifts through a neon-soaked dream vision of Las Vegas and experiences a series of encounters alternately mundane, surreal, and menacing, while death and violence hover ever-present in the margins. Awash in lush, hallucinatory images, Queen of Diamonds is a haunting study of female alienation with intellectual heft and formal rigor from a filmmaker whose work can be compared to Akerman, Fassbinder, and Lynch, but with a unique, singular vision all her own.

Queen of Diamonds will also be presented, along with Menkes's nightmarish true-crime feature The Bloody Child, by the UCLA Film Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles on June 15th.

Based on her viral Filmmaker Magazine article "The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Weinstein Wasn't Working in a Vacuum," Menkes' Sex and Power examines the ways formal shot design is gendered. Analyzing a series of film clips by major filmmakers-including Scorsese, Welles, Spike Lee, and many others-Menkes shows how traditional cinematic language underlies and supports sexual assault, harassment, and employment discrimination against women. The presentation has appeared at Sundance, Cannes, and the AFI International Film Festival, and is currently being made into a feature length documentary. Maria Giese, who instigated the historic ACLU and EEOC investigations against the Hollywood studios' Title VII violations, will moderate a discussion following the talk.

Nina Menkes is the writer, director, and cinematographer of six feature films, including Magdalena Viraga (1986), Phantom Love (2007) and Dissolution (2012). Her films have shown widely at major festivals, including Sundance, Locarno, the Berlinale and she has had retrospectives internationally. Menkes has received American Film Institute and Guggenheim Fellowships, and was an artist-in-residence under the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. She is currently a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts, and developing two new projects: Minotaur Rex, a horror-drama about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, (produced by Eos World Fund), and Heatstroke a psychological thriller about two sisters set in Cairo and LA (produced by Marginalia Pictures).