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Minotaur

A New Film by Nina Menkes

Synopsis

This new work is inspired by the mythological Minotaur, who lived in the center of a dark maze, and exerted a horrendous destructive force on the surrounding world, killing and devouring innocent young men and women ceaselessly. In the original myth, it is Ariadne’s love and her golden thread which leads Theseus safely out of the maze after he manages to slay the Minotaur. Menkes’s contemporary version features a modern Palestinian in the hero’s role of Theseus, and is set in the Old City of Jerusalem, using the resonant blood-drenched, narrow streets as a living labyrinth.
Film Status

A French/German Co-Production currently seeking additional financing.

The script for MINOTAUR has been awarded development grants from CECArtsLink and the Creative Capital Foundation.

Official Website (Coming Soon)

The Director

NINA MENKES’s films have shown widely in major international film festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Locarno, the Viennale, the Berlinale, as well as at La Cinematheque Francaise, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her many honors include a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for her first feature film MAGDALENA VIRAGA, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award. Her work has been listed on many periodicals “Top Ten Films of the Year” lists, including Film Comment and, repeatedly, The Los Angeles Times. THE BLOODY CHILD was named one of the best films of the past fifty years by the Viennale Int’l Film Festival, Austria.

Menkes’s award-winning features also include the documentary shot in Beirut, Lebanon, MASSAKER (2005), about the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, which premiered at the Berlinale and received a FIPRESCI Prize and the surreal drama PHANTOM LOVE (2007) which premiered at Sundance to critical raves. DISSOLUTION (2010), shot in Tel Aviv-Yafo, was awarded BEST DRAMA at its premiere at the Jerusalem International Film Festival and was named “One of the Year’s Top Five Films” by Sight and Sound magazine.

Menkes’s work shows theatrically, has also been broadcast on PBS, the Sundance Channel, as well as on WDR German Television and other foreign networks. One of the few women alive to have completed six feature films, retrospectives of Nina’s work have shown in Los Angeles, New York City and many European capitals.

The Producer

TONY COPTI, a Palestinian producer from Jaffa, has worked on the producing team of dozens of films, including the Academy Award-nominated feature AJAMI (Best Foreign Film), directed by Scandar Copti with Yaron Shani (Inosan Productions), THE GOLGOTHA FILES, directed by Zoltan Spirandelli (UFA Fernseh Production), Nadav Lapid’s POLICEMAN (Laila Film) which won the Grand Jury Prize at Locarno, and the Jerusalem Int’l FIlm Festival award-winning feature DISSOLUTION by Nina Menkes (Transfax Film Productions).

In 2011, Tony and his brother Jiries joined forces and created FRESCO, a dynamic company that provides production services and finance structuring to films with the highest artistic standards. FRESCO was the executive production company of the feature film THE ATTACK by Ziad Doueiri and GIRRAFADA by Rani Massalha.

Having worked together successfully in the past on DISSOLUTION, which also uses mythic elements to address political and emotional issues, Copti anticipates another powerful collaboration with Nina Menkes on MINOTAUR.

DUSK AT QALANDIA CHECKPOINT

Film Opening

MINOTAUR COSTUME

Based on this sculpture by Emil Alzamora

“POTENT AND LUMINOUS...A SEDUCTIVELY POWERFUL VISION.”
Los Angeles Times
“NO LESS THAN DAVID LYNCH, MS. MENKES IS AN ARTIST OF THE UNCONSCIOUS FOR WHOM THE CREATIVE AND THE SPIRITUAL QUEST ARE ONE AND THE SAME.”
New York Times.
The European languages are members of the same family. Their separate existence is a myth. For science, music, sport, etc, Europe uses the same vocabulary.
Jack Woods, Somecompany inc.
 
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