Film and Video

The Museo Reina Sofía and Márgenes. Madrid International Film Festival, which explores new audiovisual idioms, begin a new collaboration. This joint project comprises the organisation of an annual series — this year devoted to artist and theorist Hito Steyerl (Munich, 1966) — the presentation of the festival inside the Museo and the performance of a live audiovisual piece. For the fourteenth edition of Márgenes, held from 22 to 30 November 2024, the work Does It Still Matter (2024), by composer and artist Noémi Büchi (Zürich, 1991), is due to be performed.

Each autumn, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española jointly organise a film series which stretches across a two-month period, offering comprehensive retrospectives and anthological panoramas, many screened for the first time in Spain. This year’s edition centres on exploring the relationship between film and esperpento and dovetails with the exhibition Esperpento. Popular Art and Aesthetic Revolution, held in the Museo Reina Sofía, and its reflection on the concept formulated by the writer Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936) in culture, art and thought in Spain.

This edition is devoted to de caballos y guitarras (Of Horses and Guitars, 2024), the latest feature-length film by artist, curator and researcher Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, Huelva, 1964), who will also present the film in both sessions. After the screening in the first session, the artist will take part in a discussion with the audience, while the second showing will be followed by a concert performed by Raül Refree and Alfredo Lagos.

American film-makers Serge Garcia and Richard Shpuntoff, selected for the second edition of the annual Joaquim Jordà Residencies, organised conjointly by the Museo Reina Sofía, Doclisboa and FIDMarseille, present a selection of their films, in addition to the projects they are working on during the residency.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s outdoor summer cinema series returns, once again, in the Sabatini Building Garden throughout the months of July and August. The subject matter of this year’s edition explores how film reflects on itself or, similarly: how film thinks about film. From its origins to the present day, the film medium has explored its own nature from different perspectives: as a magical phenomenon of light and time, as a creative obsession, as an industry with its trades, conditions and precarities or as a series of narrations that depict a community.

This encounter welcomes screenings of films by Shuruq Harb (Ramallah, 1980), Shereen Abdel-Karim Hassanein (Gaza City, 1996) and Lara Salous (Ramallah, 1988), three Palestinian multidisciplinary artists that are part of the Tadafuq project, which provides artistic training and mentoring online for Palestinian creatives from the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem. The initiative has been developed by artist and curator Nicolás Combarro since 2020.

The Museo Reina Sofía extends a carte-blanche invitation to members of the Radical Film Network, made up of historians and theorists from political and independent cinema, to put together a film programme of their choice in the Museo. In response, those in the network have selected fragments of films from the Sanrizuka documentary series made by Ogawa Productions, a seminal, non-fictional film collective from Japan that was founded in 1968 by film-maker Shinsuke Ogawa (1935–1992), a pre-eminent figure in Japanese cinema. 

With reverberations and protests around the world, Palestine has become a paradigm for a future to be recovered. Slogans such as Palestine Is Everywhere and Palestine Is All Around must be read in light of the rejection of the expansion of the colonial regime as they evoke the vindication and shared sense of inter-connected dissidences and movements for international freedom: from Palestine to the Brazilian rainforest, from Chiapas to Guinea-Bissau.

The focal point of this film season organised by the Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid is film-maker Billy Woodberry (Dallas, 1950), whose filmography, despite comprising only a handful of works, is striking for its great political and creative intensity. Through his films, Woodberry unearths and probes episodes of history that have disappeared into obscurity, stressing that which official accounts deemed irrelevant to then place them under the spotlight, not solely from activism but also capturing their sensorial and poetic side.  

Through poetry, the moving image and debate, the programme looks to expand social awareness and promote civic commitment in support of robust, effective and urgent measures for the eco-social crisis we are currently facing. The scheduled activities are laid out according to the four laws of ecology formulated by Barry Commoner, a North American biologist and activist.

Mariano Llinás, one of the most original and salient figures in recent cinema, returns after his epic La flor (The Flower, 2018) with a metafictional piece on family, memory and art history. The film explores the process of producing a biographical documentary around the figure of the illustrious architect Clorindo Testa (1923–2013), a friend of the film-maker’s father, the poet and art critic Julio Llinás. In between, akin to a frenetic detective story, suspense, politics, autobiography and, above all, humour convene in what is also an underlying reflection on what film is and what are, if they are actually of use, the narrations the director puts forward.

By way of discussions, screenings, visits to the Museo and stage pieces, the festival substantiates the visual arts, theatre, writing, the podcast and the fanzine as key tools to imagine and build inclusive cultural spaces for the realities racialised people face, and to steadfastly bring about communal enjoyment, reflection and laughter and promote co-existence and social participation.

José Rodríguez Soltero (Santurce, 1943 – New York, 2009) was an experimental film-maker whose productions were made across the 1960s and 1970s. His audiovisual work stands at the intersection of the avant-garde, queer representations and Latin culture from that era (specifically, Nuyoricans: Puerto Ricans living in New York). This film series screens all three and features presentations by Juan A. Suárez, a specialist in North American underground cinema, Rolando Peña, a Venezuelan artist and protagonist in Dialogue with Che, and MM Serra, a film-maker, curator and film archivist who oversaw the restoration of the three works.

The Museo Reina Sofía develops a diverse programme inside the framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. Under the title The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, this edition calls attention to the Caribbean region’s make-up of hybridisations, mixes and creolisations, a mental and geographical space traversed by the poetics of relation, in reference to the concept of Martinique thinker Édouard Glissant.

“To every age its art; to every art its freedom”, reads the inscription on the façade of the Vienna Succession Pavilion. The same ideal runs through the Jeonju International Film Festival (South Korea), which, for over twenty years, has charted the film-making of our time by means of independently made productions. This series, therefore, compiles a selection of such films, many of which have never been shown in Spain, for the purposes of sketching a global map of today’s auteur cinema.

The centrepiece of this new edition is Mamántula (2023), by Ion de Sosa (Urnieta, Gipuzkoa, 1981), a fictional feature-length film on the freedom of desire which blends psychosexual thriller, gay porn and science fiction. The screening includes a presentation and talk by the director in both sessions.

The medium-length documentary Serigne vs the EU (2022) tells the story of Serigne Mbayé: a migrant fisherman who uses his own life experiences to shed light on Europe’s abusive fishing policies in African waters and the fight against institutional xenophobia before political leaders at the heart of the European Union. 

This activity presents a screening of the feature-length documentary Orlando, mi biografía política (Orlando. My Political Biography, 2023), by the philosopher and writer Paul B. Preciado, and features an intervention, in the second session, by the artist, writer and poet Roberta Marrero, the author of El bebé verde: infancia, transexualidad y héroes del pop (Lunwerg Editores, 2016) and Todo era por ser fuego. Poemas de chulos, trans y travestis (Continta me tienes, 2022).

This encounter screens the video installation Una voz para Erauso. Epílogo para un tiempo trans (A Voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a Trans Time, 2022), by artist duo Cabello/Carceller, a work recently acquired by the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. It also features a presentation by the writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, the author of the novel Las niñas del naranjel (The Girls from the Orange Grove, Penguin Random House, 2023) on Catalina/Antonio de Erauso.

Film-maker and activist Philip Rizk looks over the key junctures in his artistic and personal trajectory, via an encounter and a workshop, to reflect on how the moving image weaves affective communities and collective forms of utterance. Rizk experiments with different techniques in his films that range from performance or the limits between fiction and documentary to the found footage montage, with a view to making the habitual strange and posing the question: How do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?

This conference examines the historical relationship between colonialism, authoritarianism and fossil fuels from the spheres of ecological and energy humanities.

This year, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española centre their joint annual film series on Peter Watkins (UK, 1935), one of the leading rebellious film-makers of our time who, through his work, sets forth a critique of the manipulation and standardisation of the mass media, and its compliance with the interests of powers governing the world, and holds the belief that documentary’s narrative and formal experimentation can lead us to being free and independent citizens.

The Nature Camera is a film series which gathers recent films in different genres — fiction, documentary, essay, experimental film — from different countries around the world, works with their gaze fixed on the relationship between the human and the non-human. 

This fresh edition shows the national premiere of Man in Black (2023) by Wang Bing (China, 1967), a documentary feature film on memory, truth and the power of music from the biography of composer Wang Xilin (China, 1936). The director will also present the film and participate in the conversation that follows the screening.

José María Berzosa (Spain, 1928 — France, 2018) is a missing link in the history of Spanish cinema, his filmography, made entirely in France, characterised by the use of sarcasm and parody against despotic power. The documentary’s four episodes unmask the monstrosities of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, while also spotlighting film’s capacity to confront tyranny and represent the subjugated.

Chile or Utopian Imagination is a programme of activities which gathers film, textile and community art, critical thought and poetry to explore memory in relation to the project of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) Government, the coup d’état and Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile by way of the work of different artists and thinkers.

This new edition of the summer cinema is devoted to the monsters that inhabit our collective imaginary and customarily represent not only evil, but also the strange, the marginal and the maladjusted. Every Friday and Saturday throughout July and August, the series convenes a bestiary of vampires, witches and other special beings inside the Museo, a coven of deviants and dissidents to share historical phobias, cook up a rejection of the norm and offer an alternative, monstrous gaze through film.  

Italian artists Yervant Gianikian (Merano, 1942) and Angela Ricci Lucchi (Rome, 1942–2018) are both pivotal figures in avant-garde cinema, their work centred on films and filmic, compilation-based installations which explore the twentieth-century’s major wars and the ideologies that occasion them. This programme is a retrospective with the catastrophe of war as its fulcrum and includes the international premiere of the artists’ last film Frente a Guernica (In Front of Guernica, 2023).

Joseph Morder (Trinidad and Tobago, 1949) is a film-maker and diarist whose Super-8 films are a monument to experimentation and film as a way of life. This programme, comprising three, single-screening sessions, unveils three of his films on the city of Madrid and its people, neighbourhoods, history and lives: Niños, niñas (Malasaña) (Boys, Girls [Malasaña], 1978), L’Été madrilène (The Madrid Summer, 1978) and La Gran Vía de Rita Jones (The Gran Vía of Rita Jones, 1996). The film-maker will be in attendance at all three screenings.

In memory of Carlos Saura (1932–2023), this programme screens two films: Las paredes hablan (The Walls Can Talk, 2022), the film-maker’s final work centred on artistic impulses that extend from pre-historic cave painting to contemporary graffiti, and Deprisa, deprisa (Hurry, Hurry! 1980), one of Saura’s early films and a major landmark in his oeuvre.

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid bring into focus Narimane Mari (Algeria, 1969) in this film series, which includes the international premiere of her latest film S'il etait une fois (If Once Upon a Time, 2023), three live music sessions, presentations of different films and a conversation with the artist and film-maker.

A number of pre-eminent film-makers like Jean Vigo, François Truffaut and Abbas Kiarostami have made films about childhood, but few have forged such a coherent body of work as Xhanfise Keko (Albania, 1929–2007). Keko, a peerless film-maker who made eleven fictional features between 1972 and 1984 in Albania, explored the challenges, frustrations and aspirations of children. This retrospective, the first in Spain and one of the few organised internationally, includes four of her — recently restored — films, screened in double sessions.

This fresh edition of Interval presents El agua (Water, 2022), a feature film by Elena López Riera (Spain, 1982), accompanied by Las vísceras (Entrails, 2016), a short film on the ritual and attraction of daily rural life. López Riera, with a filmography straddling gruesome realism and magical thinking, has established herself as one of the most original voices in new Spanish cinema. 

Inside the Celebrating Picasso 1973–2023 programme, and in one unique session, Guernica: el último exiliado (Guernica: The Last Exile) is screened, a documentary film centred on the iconic mural’s arrival in Spain seven months after the coup d’état attempt in 1981. In this instance, it is presented by its director, Guillermo Logar, and features a conversation with Genoveva Tussell and Álvaro Martínez-Novillo.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s ongoing programme of film premieres, Intervals, shows recent works made either during the year in progress or the previous one. This fresh edition is devoted to Charlotte Wells (Scotland, 1987), 2022’s standout film-maker for her debut feature Aftersun (2022), a beautiful and melancholy reflection on family relationships, the real and imaginary dimension of memories and the passing of time.

The Museo Reina Sofía screens Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman’s (Brussels, 1950 – Paris, 2015) classic and widely acclaimed film. The screening is presented by Laura Mulvey, an historian and feminist film theorist and author of the essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Film Narrative’, first published the same year as Akerman’s film was released.   

This latest edition of Interval presents Eami (2022), a film by Paz Encina (Paraguay, 1971) which, through magic realism, narrates the Indigenous conception of the world and the massacre of nature at the hands of financial exploitation. The film won the Tiger Award for Best Feature Film at the 51^st International Film Festival Rotterdam.

In conjunction with the restoration of Sambizanga(1973–1974), a key work among the political films made in Africa, this double session is structured around the French film-maker of African origins Sarah Maldoror (Gers, 1929 – Paris, 2020).

In conjunction with 8M, the Museo organises a transversal programme with a focus on feminisms which, intersected by new present-day demands — the right to health and housing, climate justice — continue to call out different forms of violence that persist in today’s society as they interweave complicities and affection to make new horizons possible.

This fresh edition welcomes film-maker Irene M. Borrego’s film La Visita y Un Jardín secreto (The Visit and a Secret Garden), the winner of awards at the Málaga Film Festival, Documenta Madrid and Doclisboa in 2022. The film centres on Isabel Santaló, a Spanish painter whose career remains shrouded in obscurity. The screening is accompanied by a talk with the director and a special guest in each session: Lola Hinojosa and Antonio López, respectively.

The sinking of the Prestige in 2002 demonstrated how the majority of contemporary environmental disasters give rise to significant mobilisations of mutual aid and demands in the places where they occur. In this four-day encounter, different researchers, artists, activists and citizens reflect on the relations between ecology, memory and democracy today. The programme revolves around four axes: environmental traditions stretching from the anti-Francoist struggle to the present; memory and citizen creativity following the Prestige oil spill; authoritarian threats that loom from the depletion of fossil fuels; and controversies around imaginable futures.

The Museo organises Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning, a double programme which is part of the 40^th Autumn Festival of Madrid. The first part features the performance of Monument 0.6: Heterochrony, a stage piece by Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon, who creates an imaginary scene between past and present.

Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning is the title under which a set of activities are set in motion around the echo of activities celebrating All Souls Day with a programme of live arts, before continuing with a study group under the same name. It seeks to open up a dialogue around mourning as a human process of loss and mourning established by the world through reflections from artistic forms of expression, social movements and environmental activism.

Museo Reina Sofía presents a new edition of the anthological film series co- organized with the Filmoteca Española since 2016. This edition charts the work of thirty-four women filmmakers from fifteen Eastern European countries made between 1943 and 1993 and includes titles from such prominent figures as Věra Chytilová, Márta Mészáros, Evelyn Schmidt, and Binka Zhelyazkova, among others.