Screening of Beatrice Gibson and Nina Menkes’ films

Introduction by Jessica Macor

Beatrice Gibson, Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs, 2019, 21’
(English, French & Portuguese, English subtitles)
Two sisters (who are not sisters), two pregnancies, a two-seater car, a beauty queen, a poodle. The election of a second fascist — this time in Brazil. A crime thriller without a crime. Based on an original screenplay by Gertrude Stein, written in 1929 as European fascism was gaining momentum, Deux Soeurs is set in contemporary Paris in a moment of comparable social and political unrest. Casting an intimate network of the director’s friends and influences as its principle actors, from renowned New York school poet Alice Notley to educator Diocouda Diaoune and playing on Stein’s interest in autobiography and repetition, Deux Soeurs is simultaneously an abstract thriller and a collective portrait. An exploration of inheritance, responsibility, ethics and futurity.

Nina Menkes, Queen of Diamonds, 1991, 77’
(English, no subtitles)
Queen of Diamonds follows the alienated life of Firdaus (Tinka Menkes), a blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas landscape juxtaposed between glittering casino lights and the deteriorating desert oasis. Negotiating a missing husband and neighbouring domestic violence, Firdaus’ world unfolds as a fragmented but hypnotic interplay between repetition and repressed anger. Shot with a beautiful compositional rigour echoing Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Queen of Diamonds is a remarkable and demanding masterpiece of American independent filmmaking. Heralded as one of the most challenging and subversive filmmakers working today, the re-release of Queen of Diamonds marks the start of a new critical recognition for Menkes’ groundbreaking body of work.