Cynthia Madansky

1+8

Cynthia Madansky, Angelika Brudniak

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.

Treyf

Cynthia Madansky, Alisa Lebow

Alisa Lebow, Cynthia Madansky

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.

Anna Pina Teresa

Cynthia Madansky

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.

Spellbeamed

Cynthia Madansky

“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.

Flowers for LH

Cynthia Madansky

Flowers for LH reflects on the last play written by Lorraine Hansberry entitled What Use Are Flowers?

Winter

Cynthia Madansky

A silent film portraying winter across three continents.

White Sands

Cynthia Madansky

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.

Ritual by Rote

Cynthia Madansky

A super 8 projection which references the essay “On the Jewish Question” by Karl Marx.

Sites Unseen

Cynthia Madansky

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.

Dear

Cynthia Madansky

Anna Yu, Shu Xiao Zhao

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.

ḤARĀM

Cynthia Madansky

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.

Bubble

Cynthia Madansky

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.

GRACE + GRAVITY

Cynthia Madansky

Grace + Gravity is a choreographed performance that reflects on Simone Weil's poetic and profound writing entitled Gravity and Grace.

Internal Combustion

Cynthia Madansky, Alisa Lebow

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 .

1+8 Installation

Cynthia Madansky, Angelika Brudniak

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.

VIVA ÁGUA

Cynthia Madansky

Joanne Burke

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.”