Cynthia Madansky
Historia
Cynthia Madansky (co-producer, director, writer) is a filmmaker, visual artist, and graphic designer. She recently completed a conceptual art installation entitled "On the Jewish Question." In 1995, she also made two short films: INTERNAL COMBUSTION (distributed by Video Data Bank) in collaboration with Alisa Lebow, and WE AT HER, shown at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and screened at the prestigious Feminale in Cologne, 1996. In 2002, she completed another film, PAST PERFECT which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Madansky is a graduate of the Cooper School of Art, Whitney Independent Study Program, Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, and has completed her MFA at the Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University. Her films have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and her other work in East and West Jerusalem, Caracas, Sydney, Paris, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, and NYC.
Director
Flowers for LH reflects on the last play written by Lorraine Hansberry entitled What Use Are Flowers?
Director
AA is a portrait of the dream diaries of Russian avant garde feminist poet and photographer Anna Alchuk.
Director
Kalan / What Remains is a dance film shot in Istanbul reflecting on excerpts from the novel Kalan by Leyla Erbil.
Director
A contemporary interpretation of an unrealized script entitled Women, written by Soviet director Esfir Shub.
Director
Subjectively capturing the spirit of contemporary Athens, Madansky turns to Greek anarchist poet Katerina Gogou as a source of inspiration. The relationship between cinematic form and language is questioned using performance as a guiding force, accompanied by a striking soundtrack by longtime collaborator and contemporary harp pioneer Zeena Parkins.
Director
Shot in the northeast United States landscape, Willie and Brewsie reflects on the contemporary resonances of the last novella written by Gertrude Stein in 1946 entitled Brewsie and Willie.
Director
Grace + Gravity is a choreographed performance that reflects on Simone Weil's poetic and profound writing entitled Gravity and Grace.
Director
ḤARAM is an essay film portraying the urgent contemporary situation at the Haram Al Sharif/ Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jerusalem reflecting on the growing Temple Mount Faithful movement whose goal is to build the Jewish Third Temple on this holy landscape and in turn to assert Jewish sovereignty over this holy Muslim site.
Director
VIVA ÁGUA is a meditation on the philosophical work entitled ÁGUA VIVA written by Clarice Lispector in 1973. The film reflects on Lispector’s interior experimental monologue on the “instant-now” of time, the discomforts of language which are “beyond thought” and the harmonious dissonant reminders and remainders of that “sometime what is seen is ineffable.”
Director
E42 is a cinematic exploration of the area in Rome knows as the EUR, a modernist landscape that was originally designated by Mussolini as the the site of the World Fair of 1942 and as a celebration of the 20 year anniversary of Fascism. Originally designed as a monumental space for public performance and collective acts of solidarity to the Fascist regime, this landscape was in fact never inaugurated. After the war, the 420 acre area was recuperated and today projects a timeless aura of an unfinished and temporary, empty and silent, monumental and imposing as well as an ephemeral landscape.
Director
Anna, Pina, Teresa reinterprets the pivotal scene in Rossellini’s “Roma Città Aperta” where Anna Magnani, who plays the character Pina, (based on the story of Teresa Gullace,) is murdered on the streets of Rome by the Fascist police. This scene is characterized by three movements performed by Magnani — resistance, running and falling. Filmed in the Sala Scherma at Foro Italico in Rome (Mussolini’s fencing studio designed by Moretti) Anna, Pina, Teresa examines the contemporary and historical dynamics between an urban Fascist space and movements of resistance.
Director
Featuring Turkish dancer Idil Kemer, Cynthia Madansky integrates performances of everyday movements and gestures as a direct response to the devastation brought about by the state-sponsored urban renewal project in downtown Istanbul.
Camera Operator
White Sands is a 3 screen projection 16mm film installation which reflects on the visible and invisible manifestations of the nuclear fuel chain on the land, air, water and people of New Mexico.
Camera Operator
Dear features the interior world of two teenage Chinese girls in New York City, whose diary entries reveal their concerns related to growing up as immigrants amidst the ever-gentrifying landscape of Chinatown.
Director
Dear features the interior world of two teenage Chinese girls in New York City, whose diary entries reveal their concerns related to growing up as immigrants amidst the ever-gentrifying landscape of Chinatown.
Director
If Not is a meditation on love, inspired by If Not, Winter by Sappho, translated by Anne Carson. Filmed in Ephesus and Brooklyn.
Director
White Sands is a 3 screen projection 16mm film installation which reflects on the visible and invisible manifestations of the nuclear fuel chain on the land, air, water and people of New Mexico.
Director
1+8 is a dynamic eight-screen video installation about Turkey and her eight neighbors based on the feature film of the same name directed by Cynthia Madansky and Angelika Brudniak. Each screen features life on both sides of the border, from Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Nakchivan [Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan] to Syria.
Director
1+8 is a film about Turkey’s unique position between West and East and her relationship to her eight very distinct and diverse neighbors. 1+8 is filmed close up on border towns of Turkey with Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Nakhchivan/Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Kurds who are scattered amongst the many without a homeland, exploring what connects and separates the people on both sides. The film showcases through intimate portraits, personal accounts and cinematographic tropes, Turkey’s eight borderlands revealing the political and cultural dynamics of life on those frontiers. The contemplation of all eight neighboring countries reveals the complexity and importance of Turkey’s geo-political position between West and East, Europe and Asia, the European Union and the Middle East.
Director
“Spellbeamed uses the acts of translation and transcription to amplify the questions: ”what is a score?” and “what kind of musicalities can be transmitted through extended ideas of scoring?” The inspiration for the piece was the archival collection of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin.
Director
Bubble is a short film performed by Zeena Parkins and the Plastic Girls, Eleanor Hullihan and Erin Cornell in a public park in Brooklyn, NY.
Director
The town Minot is home to a U.S. Air Force base that guards 150 nuclear missiles buried in northern North Dakota. The weapons of mass destruction placed there 50 years ago are still targeted at Russia. Minot, North Dakota portrays an American landscape where people live with nuclear bombs in their backyard.
Director
A silent film portraying winter across three continents.
Director
Alex and José, is a 16mm single channel projection that explores gender, movement and form.
Writer
Elle is an experimental dance film shot in a semi industrial landscape in Brooklyn reflecting on every day movements of falling and getting up.
Director
Elle is an experimental dance film shot in a semi industrial landscape in Brooklyn reflecting on every day movements of falling and getting up.
Director
The PSA Project is a series of 15 videos that speak out against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the act of war.
Director
Still Life gazes unflinchingly at the violence of war, observing the eerie architecture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip collapsed under Israeli occupation. This portrait provides brutal witness to how government sanctioned destruction metes upon structures of home and State. Unlike the mediated images of current warfare, Still Life examines the effects of the destruction of Occupation through the details of cinematic landscapes and its inherent inhabitants. In its relentless questioning reaffirmed with a unique and unremitting soundtrack by composer Zeena Parkins, Still Life forces us to focus on details of devastation.
Director
A sparing and minimal travelogue of Istanbul. A foreigner meditates on the unraveling of a relationship while moving from hotel room to hotel room. In a city simultaneously devoted to Islam and secular nationalism, she finds refuge in the frailty and severity of the rituals of devotion.
Director
Sites Unseen is a 3 channel 16mm projection of the Jewish cemetary in Warsaw, a photograph of a great Aunt who died in Treblinka, and my late grandmother eating her morning cornflakes.
Director
“Past Perfect” is a spirited meditation on the elusiveness and inaccessibility of (Jewish) history as conveyed through sightseeing tours of “Jewish” Poland, a grandmother’s recollection of life in America during War II, and memoir-like “last moments” of a great aunt believed to have died in Treblinka. Shot almost entirely in contemporary Poland, “Past Perfect” lyrically portrays the relentless yet ultimately futile attempt to resuscitate a history literally gone up in smoke.
Director
A super 8 projection which references the essay “On the Jewish Question” by Karl Marx.
Producer
TREYF —“unkosher” in Yiddish— is an unorthodox documentary by and about two Jewish lesbians who met and fell in love at a Passover “seder”. With personal narration, real and imagined educational films, and haunting imagery, filmmakers Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky examine the Jewish identity of their upbringings and its impact on their lives.
Writer
TREYF —“unkosher” in Yiddish— is an unorthodox documentary by and about two Jewish lesbians who met and fell in love at a Passover “seder”. With personal narration, real and imagined educational films, and haunting imagery, filmmakers Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky examine the Jewish identity of their upbringings and its impact on their lives.
Director
TREYF —“unkosher” in Yiddish— is an unorthodox documentary by and about two Jewish lesbians who met and fell in love at a Passover “seder”. With personal narration, real and imagined educational films, and haunting imagery, filmmakers Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky examine the Jewish identity of their upbringings and its impact on their lives.
TREYF —“unkosher” in Yiddish— is an unorthodox documentary by and about two Jewish lesbians who met and fell in love at a Passover “seder”. With personal narration, real and imagined educational films, and haunting imagery, filmmakers Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky examine the Jewish identity of their upbringings and its impact on their lives.
Director
A story about a woman descending into mental illness.
Director
This experimental video breaks the many silences surrounding lesbians and AIDS. Interweaving the voices of two friends, Internal Combustion reflects on the often unspoken tensions within this epidemic of survival and power and mourning and loss .
Additional Camera
A video-verité manifesto made with self-identified gender outlaw, author and activist, Leslie Feinberg (1949-2014). Raw and confrontational, this videotape asks its audience to examine their assumptions about the "nature" of gender, challenging any nead certainties and calling for more sensitivity and awareness of the human rights and dignity of trans people.
