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.