VINJETA: U FOKUSU
Program IN FOCUS in cooperation with NGO Woman’s Rights Center
USA/ 2022/ 107’
DIRECTED BY: Nina Menkes
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Shana Hagan
EDITED BY: Cecily Rhett
MUSIC: Sharon Farber
SOUND DESIGN: John Polito, Michael Stern
PRODUCER: Nina Menkes
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Tim Disney, Susan Disney Lord, Abigail Disney
Brainwashed is based on director Nina Menkes’s cinematic presentation Sex and Power, the Visual Language of Cinema that uses film clips by A-list directors from the 1940s through to the present, to show how the very grammar of cinema contributes to conditions that create discriminatory hiring practice, pay inequity and a pervasive environment of sexual harassment in the film industry and beyond.
Nina Menkes is considered a cinematic feminist pioneer and one of America’s foremost independent filmmakers. Menkes has shown widely in major international film festivals including multiple premieres at Sundance, the Berlinale, Cannes (ACID), Rotterdam, Locarno, Toronto, La Cinematheque Francaise, British Film Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA in New York, MOCA and LACMA in LA. Menkes’s honors include a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an AFI Independent Filmmaker Award, a Creative Capital Award and an International Critic’s Award (FIPRESCI Prize) for the feature documentary Massaker. In 2011, her feature film The Bloody Child (1996) was named one of the most important films of the past 50 years by the Viennale International Film Festival, Austria.