Film and Video

This next edition is devoted to Reas (2024), a feature-length film made by writer and theatre and film director Lola Arias (Buenos Aires, 1976) on identities, desires and fictions..

This new edition centres on Dahomey (2024), a feature-length film by French-Senegalese director Mati Diop (Paris, 1982) which explores museums, looting, memory and restitution. Winner of the Golden Bear Award for best film at Berlinale, it is one of the films of 2024.   

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.