Cynthia Madansky Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Cynthia Madansky
Directing
Biography
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.
Filmography Movies
Production
Tarlabaşı
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.
Elle
Elle is an experimental dance film shot in a semi industrial landscape in Brooklyn reflecting on every day movements of falling and getting up.
Elle
Elle is an experimental dance film shot in a semi industrial landscape in Brooklyn reflecting on every day movements of falling and getting up.
Outlaw
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.
Treyf
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
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
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.
Sites Unseen
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.
Ritual by Rote
A super 8 projection which references the essay “On the Jewish Question” by Karl Marx.
Past Perfect
“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.
Gallery
