A young, orthodox Jewish woman is alienated from her Jerusalem community and drawn into the world of spirit.

This film was inspired by a real event—a young US Marine, recently back from the Gulf War, was found digging a grave for his murdered wife in the middle of the California Mojave.

Las Vegas is what you make of it. Hollywood makes it into a place of speedy, jacked-up risk. Nina Menkes is an American Filmmaker with no interest in that Vegas. Hers is a place of great expanses of dry earth, smudged blue sky, flat lakes, lonely people and incongruously garish or claustrophobic interiors. Queen of Diamonds is about moods, the Old Testament, death, marriage, hazard and how we watch images on a screen; it is only tangentially about a black jack dealer whose husband is missing. Menkes, who once photographed Bedouin people in the Sinai, has an eye for compositional drama and a sense of pace that couldn't be more opposed to Hollywood time, which assumes viewer impatience. (...) Maintaining the integrity of a radical experimentalist with the resources of fine-grain 35mm film technology, Menkes may be on a course to making an unprecedented kind of cinema. Queen of Diamonds is a step in that course.

Story of A Red Sea Crossing. Shot in the bars and seedy hotels of East LA, this film is about the inner life of a prostitute imprisoned for killing her pimp. Winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for “Best Independent/Experimental Film of the Year”, MAGDALENA was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial as well as in over 40 other film festivals worldwide. Tinka Menkes brilliantly portrays the emotionally frozen prostitute on a circular inner journey, as she battles at the walls which surround her—both material and psychic. “I have not been so moved since watching Tarkovsky; a uniquely compelling intellectual and visual experience.”—Radio France Culture. Produced with support from a Jacob Javitz National Graduate Fellowship.

Shot in stunning black and white, with scenes that could be outtakes from some surreal haute-couture photo shoot, Phantom Love might just be the most beautiful film of the year. Looks aren't everything, however, and this is no hollow aesthetic exercise. As we follow alienated protagonist Lulu (Marina Shoif) on an impromptu trip into the darkest reaches of her own psyche - seemingly undertaken as a distraction while an unsatisfactory lover labours away on top of her - writer/director Nina Menkes creates a dreamscape of epic imaginative reach. There are shades of Alain Resnais and David Lynch here, but this film's lush mysteries are all its own - and the road that Lulu travels makes Mulholland Drive look like a layby. (source: )