American filmmaker Nina Menkes was one of the first women to present a feature film at the Sundance Film Festival (Queen of diamonds, 1991). Considered one of the leading figures of contemporary independent cinema, she cultivates a provocative and subversive style. In 2018, in an explosive lecture, she attempts to demonstrate how film language contributes to the conditions that create discriminatory hiring practices, pay inequities and a pervasive environment of sexual harassment in the film industry and beyond. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power delivers this important, critical and engaging lecture in which she theorises and denounces the 'male gaze' through excerpts from the films of leading directors from the 1940s to the present day and a series of interviews that do not spare the system or her own films.
