Aya Suzuki x ‘Magdalena Viraga’

‘I like being where I am’

A sex worker, crushed by a joyless and hopeless existence, ends up in prison after killing one of her clients. Imagination and reality blur in this surreal, poetic fever dream that established director Nina Menkes as one of the most radical feminist filmmakers of the 1980s.

Over the past three decades, “cinematic sorceress” Nina Menkes has created a radical, visually arresting body of work that defies the conventions of American independent cinema. Her breakthrough came with Magdalena Viraga (1986), which she described as “a hallucinogenic journey through the boundless vortex of unadulterated Female space.”

Set in the grimy bars and motels of 1980s Los Angeles, Magdalena Viraga is an anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist provocation: hypnotic, disorienting, and deeply political. Tinka Menkes — the director’s sister and long-time collaborator — plays a sex worker teetering on the edge of collapse, embodying quiet fury and profound sorrow. The film sits somewhere between experimental low-budget documentary and allegorical dystopia, and hits like a left hook — pulsing with feminist rage against a brutal and senseless system.