Editor: Marketa Jakesova 

Considered a cinematic feminist pioneer and one of America’s foremost independent filmmakers, Nina Menkes has shown widely in major international film festivals including multiple premieres at Sundance, the Berlinale, Cannes, Rotterdam, Locarno, Toronto, La Cinémathèque Française, British Film Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art and The New York Film Festival. Nina Menkes synthesizes inner dream-worlds with harsh, outer realities. She has been called “Brilliant, one of the most provocative artists in film today” by the Los Angeles Times and her body of work was described as “Controversial, intense and visually stunning” by Sight and Sound. Menkes has referred to herself as a witch, and Dennis Lim, writing in The New York Times, called her a “Cinematic Sorceress.” A short overview of the filmmaker’s cinematic universe, featuring iconic scenes from her fictional films can be watched here.

MA: I am aware that the path of art and filmmaking during your adolescence was neither an easy nor an easily attainable one. As a woman, young girls had to fight against many taboos to realize their dreams, thoughts, and creativity. Could you talk a little about your childhood and teenage years, and how that past has shaped who you are today?

NM: My mother’s parents were German Jews. When Hitler came to power in 1933, they left Berlin and went to Jerusalem, which was at that time the British Mandate, Palestine. So my mother actually grew up there in British Mandate Palestine. On my father’s side, he was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family. All of his family was killed in the Nazi concentration camps. He was rescued by a resistance group that helped save children and brought them to Jerusalem. So, both my parents grew up, met and got married in Jerusalem. They left almost immediately after getting married for the US to study at New York University. I grew up in the US, but I speak Hebrew, and almost every summer, growing up, we would visit my mother’s family. My father had no living family.

If you spend time in Israel and are even a little sensitive, you naturally become curious about the Arab world. I started learning Arabic when I was 18, and I’ve made many films in that region. It’s a big part of my life. In terms of my background, I identify primarily as an American, but I’ve spent significant time in that part of the world.

On the creative side, I was a dancer and choreographer as a teenager, so I had an early sense of how movement, visuals, and sound come together. I also had a natural talent for photography, and when I got the opportunity to make a short film, I was very excited. I felt like it was the right path for me. I applied to UCLA film school, and when I was accepted, I felt as though I had come home—not to a physical place, but to my true home. Filmmaking, for me, isn’t just a career; it’s a vocation.

MA: It is very interesting because it is quite evident in your films that you have a profound understanding of form and composition. The films are not merely in service of storytelling and narrative; there is a certain visual pleasure and deep aesthetic present in every scene, which elevates the work beyond mere storytelling. Let’s talk about your first film. What happened? You had a camera and started making it—I think your first film was in 1981, is that right? It was a Super 8 film.

NM: Yes, a Super 8 film, 11 minutes long, titled A Soft Warrior. I made it at the UCLA film school. Back then, the school was quite different. It’s more structured now, but at the time, it was almost like a hippie school. They had equipment and taught us how to use cameras, do sound, edit—all the technical things. But for someone like me, who had a strong sense of what I wanted to do, I wasn’t interested in learning from the masters. I just wanted to do my own thing, and there was a real space for that.

The first project we did in film school was called Project One, and it was a Super 8 film. I wanted to make a film about my sister, who had been very ill and was still living at home with my mother. I went back to their house with the plan to have my sister, Tinka, play herself as a sick person. I had cast another woman to play me as her sister, and it was going to be a sort of hallucination about her illness and our relationship.

However, the actress who was supposed to play me didn’t show up—it was a Super 8 student film, after all. My sister had just recovered from being very ill, and I suggested finding someone else to play me while she would play herself as sick. She refused, saying she didn’t want to play a sick person after just getting well—it felt like bad karma to her. So I said, “Okay, perfect. You’ll play me, and we’ll find someone else to play you.”

That was the start of our collaboration, though we didn’t know at the time how powerful it would be. We just did it. But when we looked at the Super 8 dailies, it was clear—me on camera, and Tinka’s presence as a performer—that it was very powerful and striking. That was the beginning of an unplanned collaboration, and we went on to make five films together.

MA: In the film The Great Sadness of Zohara, we encounter a woman wandering in an unfamiliar city, transcending the constraints traditionally imposed on women. She appears as a being detached from the fabric of society, driven by curiosity and a desire for exploration in life. With indifference and beyond the realm of judgment, she seeks to experience herself within the city, its buildings, homes, and spaces. In a way, she is perceived as a mad and homeless woman by the people around her, indifferent to their gazes as she continues on her path—a path towards being. The film is feminist to me as well. Let’s talk about The Great Sadness of Zohara (16mm/40 minutes/1983). I really love the film—it really affected me. What led you to make this film?

NM: Well, you know, I didn’t have any background in feminist theory. I hadn’t heard of it, but I had my own feelings and experiences, and I was very influenced by my mother. She had been in Jungian psychoanalysis, and much later, I also did 17 years of Jungian analysis. My mother influenced me with the Jungian idea of archetypal journeys. There was this book that was quite famous at the time, The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but people like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have said they were influenced by it. The book shows the hero’s journey, with Campbell finding similarities across myths and fairy tales from different cultures across time.

I thought, “Okay, I’m going to create my own hero’s journey.” But I wasn’t a man, and my main character would be a woman. I had seen several films about characters from Third World countries, like from Africa, coming to Europe and experiencing adventures, both positive and negative. I wanted to flip that idea. I wanted to make a film about a white woman on a quest into the Third World. The character would be a Jewish woman from Jerusalem who embarks on a journey into the Arab world. That concept also reflected my own experience—I speak Hebrew and have a background in Israel. For many people who come from that space, the Arab world is viewed as the “Other,” and even as the enemy.

So my character, this Jewish woman, would go into the so-called “Other Side” and then return home to Jerusalem, victorious. That was my original, conscious idea, following the Campbell hero’s journey where the hero goes into a foreign, strange world, kills the dragon, finds the princess, returns home, and becomes King. I thought, “My character will do the same.”

But I work very intuitively. We began this journey in North Africa with no money—just me with the camera, Tinka, a suitcase of costumes, and the film. We traveled by bus, stayed in $2-a-night hotels. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life—pure cinema, pure intuition.

After filming the North African scenes, we traveled back to Jerusalem, and stayed with my great aunt in Jerusalem—I was ready to film the triumphant ending. Tinka and I went out to shoot, and I tried to capture these victorious shots—like “Tinka’s Head and the Dome of the Rock.” Or other “triumphant” images. But everything felt wrong. I didn’t shoot anything. I couldn’t push “go” on the camera. I went home and realized the next morning, “Oh my God, the end is not victorious!” So we went back out and shot the real ending.

Later, I read a wonderful essay—though I can’t remember the title—about women’s quest fiction. It explained that women’s journeys don’t follow the hero’s journey. A woman on a deep inner quest doesn’t return and get crowned as “Queen”. Instead, she is re-accommodated to her secondary status. When I read that, I understood my film. But at the time, it was created in a completely intuitive way.

Looking back, I feel that’s still true in my life. I’ve struggled deeply, made films with integrity, and received acclaim, but I’m still fighting. I have a new film I want to make, but it feels impossible to get funding. A man with my credentials and resume would never in a million years face this situation.

MA: What a beautiful story. I completely agree, and it feels as though the world is enveloped by masculine power and the dominance of the cis-male authority. Our mission is to bring about a balance, through our presence, relentless creation, perseverance, and care. Perhaps, this way, future generations will not endure the suffering we faced and can engage with more just and equitable matters. 

Another film you made is Magdalena Viraga, (16mm/90 minutes/1986). I wanted to know, this time, which book—I mean, a feminist book—affected you? Of course, at that time, it was the peak of the second wave of feminism, and I wanted to know because the film is so feminist, and it’s amazing.

NM: Well, there were two things that really affected me. The first actually happened after I showed The Great Sadness of Zohara at UCLA. A huge crowd came, which was amazing—they even had to add an extra screening. But after the screening, a lot of Jewish people came up to me, saying things like, “Why is this woman so sad? Why is she so alienated? Don’t you feel happy in Israel? What do you know about Judaism anyway?”

So, I started thinking, “Maybe I really don’t know much about Judaism.” I mean, I speak Hebrew because of my family, and I’d been to Israel many times, but I didn’t have a deep understanding of the religion itself. My family were secular German Jews, so I hadn’t grown up religious.

After that, I decided to learn more, so I went on a program that offered a free trip to Israel if you studied at a yeshiva for six weeks. I figured, why not? I wanted to visit my mom and sister there anyway. So, I spent six weeks at this yeshiva for women. But, the first thing I noticed was that the men had this beautiful place to study in the Old City, overlooking the Wailing Wall, while the women were stuck in this tiny, horrible apartment in a run-down building near the central bus station. And then there were a number of experiences that really stuck with me. Like when we went to the beach, all the American girls were in bathing suits, but the woman leading us was completely covered, even in the water. She couldn’t swim at all, she was dragged down by wet garments, came out covered in sand, and I thought, “This just doesn’t feel like God to me.”

Another time, it was boiling hot, no air conditioning, and we were learning a song. Suddenly, the teacher stopped us and said we had to close all the windows because a man might hear our voices and get excited. So, we closed the windows and were suffocating in the heat. And again, I thought, “This isn’t God for me.”

It wasn’t a mosque or anything. It was just an apartment where we studied. Very, very traditional. So anyway, I was just thinking alot about organized religion and how anti-feminist it was. When I came back to the US, I also found this wonderful book called The Politics of Women’s Spirituality. It’s an anthology put together by Charlene Spretnak in the eighties, and it’s still an incredible collection. In that anthology, I discovered a writer called Mary Daly, who wrote Beyond God the Father, which affected me very, very deeply. I was also reading Gertrude Stein at the time, and all of that came together for me—the idea of how women are excluded from traditional religious structures and how deeply sexist these constructions are. All of that sort went into a big soup that ended up becoming Magdalena Viraga.

MA: Wow! What an amazing story. I understand your progression better now.

NM: Yeah. But on a deeper level, I also thought about the issue of the hero’s journey, right? The way Joseph Campbell defines it, it’s really an imperialist journey. You have someone, typically a man, who leaves home, ventures into foreign lands, slays the dragon, takes the treasure, and returns home victorious. This is almost a blueprint for imperialism and colonialism. But what happens to the people in those other places after he steals their treasure and goes home? We never look at that. These were some of the thoughts I was grappling with.

So, in The Great Sadness of Zohara, the character Tinka tries to go on this hero’s quest. She tries to come home and be victorious, but she’s not—because she’s really stuck in that other place, the place where she’s been raped and stolen from.

Magdalena Viraga is that “other place.” You could say that The Great Sadness of Zohara was my attempt at a hero’s quest, but it collided with my intuition. And Magdalena Viraga is when she’s fully in that place that’s been plundered, where she’s been raped. She is rejecting those structures. She’s claiming her power when she says, “Yes, I am a witch.” It’s her way of asserting her strength against the systems that have violated her.

If I look at the films that I’ve made as a whole, starting from the first one all the way through, they really track a different process—one that’s very different from the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell made famous. In that narrative, the man leaves home, conquers, plunders, and returns home famous. But this isn’t the journey of the woman on a quest.

When a woman tries to go on a journey, she expects to be crowned a queen after all her hard work, but instead, she’s pushed back down into her secondary status. Magdalena Viraga really represents her being on that other side—inside that plundered land. She is there, and she’s the one being plundered.

MA: Another film you made is Queen of Diamonds (35mm/77 minutes/ 1991): A woman works in a casino, and the cuts to nature with its brilliant structure are interspersed with the scenes. An old, sick man lies bedridden, symbolizing the looming presence of death, while the woman, who works in the casino, continues to care for him. The film delicately and with subtle suspense leads us through moments in life that cinema often avoids. A car accident and a death occur softly, quietly, without dramatizing the situation. The film’s delicacy and depth in juxtaposing moments of life and death invite us to a kind of acceptance. The woman, the film’s main character (played by Tinka Menkes), serves both as a witness and a storyteller, in a state of detachment, removed from overflowing emotions or tangible suffering. She presents us with seemingly indifferent situations, which in some way become catalysts for experiencing a shared, collective wisdom. A death occurs, and shortly after, a wedding is shown in beautiful sunlight, painted with vibrant colors. We are distant from everything, yet simultaneously close. Altogether, these elements create a brilliant work. I wanted to know, in 1991, you changed from 16mm to 35mm. Tell me, what happened? Why did you change the technique from 16mm to 35mm?

NM: Well, I was quite surprised because my film Magdalena Viraga won a huge prize—the Los Angeles Film Critics Award. It was crazy for me, a very young woman, with my first feature made for $5,000 while still in film school. And I won this big award, and the film showed in festivals all over the world, including Toronto and others. Yet, nobody called. No offers. No one said, “Would you like money to make a new film?” Nothing.

And that’s the sexism I’m still experiencing today. So, I decided I wouldn’t wait for anyone to give me money because nobody was offering. I wanted to shoot on 35mm because I wanted that quality, that beauty—for both the visuals and the sound. I wrote the script and got some small grants. You know, in Europe, you can get $500,000 or a million dollars or even $5 million for films. But in the US, I got every little grant available. A Guggenheim Fellowship was $25,000, an AFI fellowship was around $15,000. Very small amounts.

So the only way I could make the film was by begging. And that’s what I did. I got on the phone and asked, “Can I please have a camera for two weeks? I’m a woman filmmaker, just graduated from film school. Can I have free donuts, and I’ll give you credit on the film?” I just kept asking for things.

For example, I wanted to shoot in a real casino. Everyone told me, “You can’t shoot in a real casino, you have to build one.” But I had no money to build a casino, and it wasn’t my style—I like the strange documentary-narrative combination. So, I decided to try anyway.

To make a long story short, I called all these casinos in Las Vegas, and I found one where the owner was a film buff. He said, “Yeah, come up, talk to me.” So I drove up, met the guy, and he gave us two weeks of hotel rooms for the cast and crew, free access to the casino, and other things. Everything we got for Queen of Diamonds was free—free lunch, free water, everything.

It was ironic because the film is about money and capitalism, and we made it through donations. But of course, I made no money on the film. I had no salary, I paid the crew a small amount, and paid myself nothing. Now the film has become a classic. It was recently inducted into the Library of Congress, the National Film Registry. This is a huge honor.  But when we made it, we got nothing—no money, nothing.

MA: I think this hasn’t changed.

NM: Correct, it’s exactly the same.

MA: Now I have exactly the same problem. Each film, no money, just begging again. How about the next film? The Bloody Child (35mm/86 minutes/1996): The music, poetry, and narration, boldly placed over the film’s sympathetic yet sometimes violent moments, create a meaningful contrast. We are confronted with several men and soldiers, while in juxtaposition, we observe a woman, naked and free in the forest. These two parallel lines driving the story forward feel like a rift, insisting on warning us about the darkness of the circumstances. Tell us about this important film. 

NM: In terms of this progression I’ve been discussing, The Bloody Child represents a further descent into hell. The journey starts with Zohara, who tries to go on a quest but fails. In Magdalena Viraga, she’s already in the underworld, and while she speaks a lot of poetry, it’s not her own voice. She’s borrowing the words of other people—like Gertrude Stein and other female writers.

Then, in Queen of Diamonds, it gets worse because the protagonist almost stops speaking altogether. It’s as though she’s lost the desire to even borrow other people’s words, and she becomes mute.

With The Bloody Child, the descent reaches a point of psychic disintegration—a final, almost suicidal collapse under the weight of patriarchal and military violence. The structure of this film is radical; it circles, over and over, almost like a spiral. There’s a phrase the police use in English: “circling the drain”—when someone is about to die, they say they’re circling the drain. This is what happens in The Bloody Child. It’s this constant circling, and you see these characters—mostly men, but there are two women—trying to deal with violence.

One of these women is Tinka, the marine captain, who tries to solve the problem of being a woman in this violent, patriarchal world by behaving like one of the men. She tries to embody that power, but it doesn’t work. You see her in these spaces where she seems almost suicidal.

Then there’s the other woman, the princess-like character who was murdered—this sweet, childlike figure. Some people have said the voice-over in the film sounds like a child talking. But in reality, this character is 23 years old, and her innocence doesn’t protect her. Being cute and small, being sweet—none of that saves her from patriarchal violence. She ends up dead.

MA: That’s exactly true, yes. Tell me about the next film. You had a big gap between 1996 and 2005. Around nine years you didn’t make any film. Then the next film  called Massacre (35mm/98 min/2005): An experimental documentary feature. This film explores brutal violence through in-depth interviews with six mass murderers, who participated personally in the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacre, twenty years after the fact. Shot entirely on location in Beirut, Lebanon.Why didn’t you make a new film for such a long time?

NM: Well, there are two big reasons. The main reason, really, is … first of all, no one wanted to give me any money, as usual. But the other thing is this descent into hell, which the films tracked—especially The Bloody Child—and it followed Tinka’s character. Tinka is a brilliant performer. One of the things so brilliant about her is that she’s not acting. She’s really there; she becomes the character completely. And the process of creating The Bloody Child, with its fragmented, almost suicidal energy, was so emotionally devastating that Tinka said, “I can’t do this anymore.” It was just too much for her.

For me, that was difficult to absorb because she and I had been on this cinematic path together for so long. I couldn’t just turn around and say, “Okay, I’ll find someone else next year.” No, it wasn’t like that. I had to process and absorb the reality of not working with Tinka anymore. The Bloody Child pushed us to the limit—formally, emotionally, and psychically—into a very extreme point of fragmentation and suicidal energy. So, after that, Tinka just couldn’t continue. It was too hard for her. That’s really why there was such a long gap.

Massacre was a documentary, so it’s very different. And I was the director of photography and co-director. It wasn’t completely my own film, but in many ways, it still looks like my films and feels like my films because I was in control of the whole mise en scène and all the visuals. I brought much of myself to the directing as well. But in any case, it was a documentary film about the mass murders in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon, where the Palestinian people were massacred. The film won a FIPRESCI prize at the Berlinale and many other awards. It’s definitely a horrific film in the sense of exposing the violence and the hatred towards Palestinians by the at the time Christian followers of Bashi Gemayal. It took until 2007 for me to make another fiction film. 

MA: Let’s talk about Phantom Love (35mm film/87 minutes/B&W/2007). A surreal psychodrama about a young woman trapped within a suffocating family, Phantom Love is a powerful evocation of one woman’s descent into self. A stunning story filmed in black and white, enveloped in a mesmerizing surreal atmosphere. What led you to decide to work in black and white, leaving behind the use of vibrant colors and colorful spaces? In a way, each frame of this film is like an extraordinary black-and-white photograph that serves the story.

 

NM: Phantom Love was interesting because I started working on the script, and I was writing about this woman who was in some ways similar to the woman that I had been tracking through all my films—who had always, of course, been played by Tinka. There were scenes of her having very alienated sex, and there were scenes of her working in a casino in my script.

The alienated sex scenes were very similar to those in Magdalena Viraga, and the casino scenes were, in some ways, reminiscent of Queen of Diamonds. And as I was working on the script, there came a point where I thought, “Oh my god, I can’t stand it. It’s just more of this terrible alienation.” I felt this character needed to break free somehow, but I didn’t know how to make that happen. You see, I always create my films intuitively, so if I wasn’t feeling free myself, I couldn’t write about a free woman.

Around that time, I met an Iraqi Jewish woman while I was visiting my mother in Jerusalem. She was ostensibly a “life coach,” but as I discovered very quickly she had a deeper practice and was actually a shamanic healer. We began working together. Our sessions were a blend of shamanic journeying and psychotherapy: it was very profound. The whole system is based on visual interior journeying. I ended up staying in Jerusalem for six months, seeing her three times a week. During this time, I experienced what felt like lucid dreaming, and many of the images for Phantom Love came to me through this process.

I’m really not sure why I felt the film should be in black and white. It was an intuitive decision and reflecting back it still seems right.

I always say that Phantom Love is a film in three acts: Act one shows the alienated woman, trapped in a frozen state, having alienated sex and performing alienated labor. Act two lasts maybe one minute or less, where she levitates above the bed. That scene was an homage to Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, but in my version, after she reaches the top, she shatters into a thousand pieces. To me, this represented the breaking open of all that frozen alienation.

(Sound of meowing).

Oh, hi, Koko! Come here, Koko. (laughs) Sorry, my black cat Koko just came in. I named her after the black cat in Phantom Love, actually. Anyway, after the shattering in act two, we move into act three, which is when all the pain and wounding that was buried beneath the frozen alienation comes pouring out. And the final image of the film is about a release of sorts—there is a glimmer of liberation—some light that the main character can finally access and feel after releasing some of her deeply frozen trauma.

MA: They wrote about Dissolution (16:9 HD PAL/88 minutes/B&W/2012) in the press: “Loosely inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Menkes’s Dissolution combines an almost surreal fairy-tale energy with brutal B&W realism to explore the condition of deep violence which permeates contemporary Israeli society. Shot in Yafo (the predominantly Arab area of Tel Aviv), the movie follows the moral collapse and first glimmer of redemption of a young, morose Israeli Jew, played brilliantly by Didi Fire.” I saw the film before Israel’s most recent crimes and genocide, and I am still proud of your vision, knowing that this film was made in 2010. If you were to make this film today, how would you approach it?

NM: If I were to remake Dissolution today … Well, I wouldn’t remake the film today. I actually have a new film about the situation that I’m trying to make right now. It’s called Minotaur Rex, and it’s based on the Greek myth of the Minotaur. It’s my retelling of that myth, set within contemporary East Jerusalem, with a Palestinian hero playing Theseus.

So, I’m not sure how I would approach Dissolution today, but some of the questions raised in that film are still very relevant. The main character, loosely based on Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, has committed one or two murders. He definitely killed the pawnbroker, and maybe her sister too. But within the context of the film, he’s unsure whether he really murdered them or if it was a dream—or perhaps it wasn’t a murder at all. These questions about responsibility are still, unfortunately, extremely relevant: the Israeli position of refusing to take responsibility for murder. Was it murder, was it “self-defense”? Was it all a dream?

In the film, the real heroine is a young Palestinian girl. At the end, the main male character—the anti-hero—asks for a sign because he’s lost faith in God, and God sends him this Arab girl, leading about 40 horses down a street in Jaffa. Is he listening? If we look at Israel today, the answer is no-one is listening. So, yeah, I think the film remains relevant today, sadly.

Of course, the situation now is completely out of control, and the USA is entirely complicit. I’m extremely distraught about it and am trying to respond in the only way I know, which is to make a film. Minotaur Rex is my response to the situation and I hope to start shooting in 2025.

MA: How about your recent documentary film Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (UHD/107 minutes/2022)? From my perspective, it is an extraordinary visual, feminist research piece. What led you to decide to incorporate feminist principles into your filmmaking?

NM: All of my films before Brainwashed came from very deep within myself. They were like images, stories, or psychic realities that were crying out from inside me to be made, asking me to, in a way, become their birth-mother and bring them into the world. It was an interior process—this internal pressure insisting that these images come out, and I just served that pressure, as their servant, in a way.

Brainwashed was completely different. This film came to me from the outside. While teaching, I would always show my students examples of how shot design is gendered. I would lecture and demonstrate how men and women are shot differently, providing examples that tied these choices in with the dual epidemics of sexual harassment/assault and employment discrimination against women. This lecture was always given within a film school setting, and I never thought it would interest people outside that context.

After the eruption of the #MeToo movement in October 2017, however, I wrote an essay for Filmmaker Magazine, explaining the core triangle of Brainwashed—shot design, sexual assault, and employment discrimination, and how they are deeply interconnected. The article went viral, and became their number one most read essay of the year. Soon after, I started getting invited to give my lecture around the world, from the AFI FEST in Los Angeles to BFI in London, IFFR in Rotterdam and even The Voice of a Woman Series in Cannes.

Every time I gave the lecture, using maybe 15 film clips, I was deluged by people afterwards saying, “You have to make this into a feature film! More people need to see this.” So, in the case of Brainwashed, it wasn’t really my idea—it came from outside pressure. People were asking me to make this movie because they felt it was needed.

I was fortunate enough to find financing for the film very quickly. Tim Disney, who was at the time the Chairman of the Board of Trustees at CalArts, where I was teaching, came on board as an Executive Producer. He brought in his two sisters, Abigail Disney and Susan Disney Lord, and with their very generous financial support, we were able to create the feature film. The film showed widely internationally after premiering at Sundance and the Berlinale and I do feel it has changed the course of cinematography.

MA: And now, your latest two-minute film Lioness (16mm/2 minutes/B&W/2022), feels like a magical exploration of the circus of life and the very core of human existence. As a filmmaker myself, I believe it takes immense courage and strength to create a two-minute film after producing so many brilliant feature-length films. This speaks to your unbounded mindset, where market constraints and cinematic standards do not define you. Instead, you challenge cinema with your freedom of expression, creativity, and your need to tell stories.

NM: Thank you for your beautiful words, and thank you for this whole interview. It has been very in-depth and meaningful to me.

Lioness, the two-minute film, was actually commissioned by the Viennale International Film Festival in Vienna, Austria. They asked me to create a trailer for the festival, but what they wanted was a short film that would also serve as a trailer. It was a great honor to be asked, especially considering the amazing filmmakers who have created trailers for the Viennale before me, including Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Claire Denis and Sergei Loznitsa. So, I was thrilled by this chance and it gave me an opportunity to make a short film. It was a truly beautiful experience for me.

I always feel happiest when I’m shooting or editing a film, and every chance I get to do that fills me with deep and profound gratitude. I’m also very thankful for this interview. Thank you so much, Mania.