Films by Dani Leventhal

Dani Leventhal’s autobiographical videos have been screened internationally in festivals and museums including the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Hammer Museum, the LA Film Forum, The New York Film Festival, PS1 and Anthology Film Archives. She is a recipient of the Astraea Visual Arts Award and her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She is distributed by Video Data Bank and V-Tape. You can read about her work in “The Multitude of Visible Things: The Videos of Dani Leventhal” by Chris Stults, in Cinemascope, Issue 47, Summer 2011.

Show & Tell in the land of Milk & Honey (13 minutes) 2007
In this piece Dani Leventhal recounts to camera her experiences of living and working in Israel, the fabled land of milk and honey of childhood lessons. With time spent in a metal factory and a battery farm for chickens, her harrowing tale includes stories of sexual harassment and sick birds. Against this background, there are idyllic images of bees and flowers, cows and calves, intimate caresses, dead birds. Every thing is worthy of Dani's gaze, and is transformed by the encounter, becoming more human or sacred, and we are closer to the pain and beauty of being alive.

Draft 9 (28 minutes) 2003
The craft of montage is alive and well in Leventhal’s work. Delicate and harrowing juxtapositions of skinned animals, the tattooed arm of a Holocaust survivor eating bagels in a coffee shop, and neon flowers on a disco floor. In her work emerges something that is extraordinarily immediate, both fresh and painful, hard to watch and yet impossible not to watch. - Genevieve Yue

Cost: Free for Burchfield Penney members; $10 suggested donation for "not-yet" members for M&T Second Friday.