Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022)
Director: Nina Menkes Run Time: 107 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2022
Starring: Catherine Hardwicke, Julie Dash, Nina Menkes, Penelope Spheeris, Rosanna Arquette
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
World Premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
“destined to forever change how its audience watches films”
—Kate Erbland for Indiewire
In this eye-opening documentary, celebrated independent filmmaker Nina Menkes explores the sexual politics of cinematic shot design. Using over 175 movie clips from 1896 – 2020, Menkes shows how these not-so-subtle embedded messages affect and intersect with the twin epidemics of sexual abuse and assault, as well as employment discrimination against women, especially in the film industry.
The film features interviews with an all-star cast of women and non-binary industry professionals including Julie Dash, Penelope Spheeris, Charlyne Yi, Joey Soloway, Catherine Hardwicke, Eliza Hittman, and Rosanna Arquette. The result is an electrifying call-to-action that will fundamentally change the way you see, and watch, movies.
About the filmmaker:
Nina Menkes is an independent filmmaker and cinematic feminist pioneer who synthesizes inner dream-worlds with harsh, outer realities. Her films have screened at international festivals including Sundance, Cannes (ACID), Rotterdam, Locarno and Toronto. Her documentary Massacre (2005), for which she was also cinematographer, won the FIPRESCI Award at the Berlinale. Her feature film The Bloody Child (1996) was selected as one of the best films of the past fifty years by the Vienna International Film Festival in Austria. Her other works include Queen of Diamonds (1991), Phantom Love (2007), and Dissolution (2010). Menkes graduated with an MFA in film production from UCLA in 1989, has received Fulbright Research Awards to the Middle East and is a member of the film faculty at the California Institute of the Arts.
In 2018-2019 Menkes toured with her cinematic talk “Sex and Power; The Visual Language of Oppression”, which was presented at multiple high profile venues including AFI Fest, BFI London, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Cannes, and Sundance. The talk was subsequently expanded into the feature documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022) and premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
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