Magdalena Viraga
Films by Nina Menkes
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1h 30m
Directed by Nina Menkes | 90 mins | 1986
Menkes took home the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s “Best Independent Film” prize with her hypnotic but disturbing debut feature, in which her sister Tinka plays Ida, a sex worker accused of killing her pimp. Moving between a string of seedy, East L.A. locales, Magdalena Viraga delivers a non-chronological drip feed of the crime’s details as Ida, a chillingly passive character who speaks in stilted fragments, struggles towards some kind of psychic liberation.
Up Next in Films by Nina Menkes
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Queen of Diamonds
Directed by Nina Menkes | 77 mins | 1991
Set in a drab, grimly coruscating Las Vegas, "Queen of Diamonds" again situates Tinka Menkes, the filmmaker’s sister, as an icon of womankind’s profound estrangement under patriarchy. Her character, Firdaus—the name borrowed from the unrepentant murderess ... -
The Bloody Child
Directed by Nina Menkes | 85 mins | 1996
Described by critics as her most radical work and by the filmmaker as her greatest, the fifth film Nina Menkes made with her sister Tinka in the lead—here, a Marine captain overseeing a murder investigation out in the Mojave—would also be their final colla...
