PHANTOM LOVE

Lulu spends most of her life working in a casino in Los Angeles's Koreatown. Her much younger lover, with whom she feels no emotional connection, and her sister Nitzan, who is on meds and in the middle of a breakdown, share the rest of her time. Lulu's visiting mother offers unwanted help, but she only complicates things. Phantom Love combines fairy-tale elements with brutal black and white photography to create a powerful document about one woman's descent into herself.

Phantom Love is the most recent feature by Nina Menkes, one of Los Angeles' leading independent film artists. Her dreamlike work depicts the interior life of women struggling with issues of domestic constraints and/or violence, and describes voyages in search of one's self. Her richly nuanced films are distinguished by luminous, surreal, and often disturbing imagery, and accompanied by soundtracks that are carefully modulated to suggest the simultaneity of the psychological and outside worlds.