Film and Video

This year, the Museo Reina Sofía participates for the first time in Spanish Film Day, an initiative of Spain’s Ministry of Culture which brings together screens and programmes from different institutions. In this edition, we retrieve a historical and pioneering work in international experimental film: ...ere erera baleibu izik subua aruaren...(1968–1970), made by artist José Antonio Sistiaga (San Sebastián, 1932). 

Twenty years on from the sinking of the Prestige, this Temporary Intensity Zone calls upon the collective potential of a self-organised citizenry facing the life-threatening side of environmental disaster.

The Museo Reina Sofía and Cineteca Madrid jointly organise the second part, and conclusion, of the retrospective devoted to the films of Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) with the international premiere of one of contemporary cinema’s most ambitious projects: the production of eleven feature-length films made by the director between 2021 and 2022.

This TIZ reflects on ghostly relationships, the relationships of events with history, of citizens with politics, of inhabitants with the home or of the missing with those still waiting for them. In the month of the dead, we think about mourning and lamenting, memory and forgetting, and forms of presence and disappearance from the unique spectrality which the same idea of a museum imposes upon us.

As another summer comes around, the Museo moves its cinema outside and into the Sabatini Building. This fresh edition is centred on musical films, viewed at once as a genre which is both playful and high-spirited and also a discourse which incorporates striking ruptures in formats and narratives.    

French-Argentinian artist Alejandra Riera conducts, alongside artists Caroline Déodat, Andreas-Maria Fohr and Antonio Menchen, a workshop in different spaces of the Museo, setting out from notions which form the backbone of her and the participating artists’ work: communal art-making, the fragility of materials and themes and film as an open process.

This programme, coinciding with the celebration of LGTBIQ+ Pride, does not look to “thematise” a pathological situation. Rather, it sets out to demonstrate the power of admitting we ourselves are fragile and vulnerable, together with other lives shaken by persecution and exile. Nor does it seek to moralise on the positions and practices outside the norm, vindicating a greater capacity for agency of and over our bodies and sexual impulses, developed here through plastic, poetic, written and performative devices. 

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid City Council, organise a retrospective on the films made by Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) between 1976 and 1986.

Political matter requires a non-dissociation of art and politics with regard to artisan work, and modes of occupying time and the relationship it articulates. 

The Museo Reina Sofía screens There Is Nothing to Understand Here, a documentary on artist Elena Asins (Madrid, 1940 — Azpirotz, Navarra, 2015), along with two of her unreleased short digital animation films. The documentary, made by Javi Álvarez and Olga Sevillano and produced by the Museo, is shown for the first time in Madrid following its international premiere at the Punto de Vista Film Festival in Navarra and a brief online viewing in May and June 2020.

This series presents the documentary and non-fiction cinema of five women filmmakers from the Middle East and the Maghreb: Atteyat Al-Abnoudy (Egypt, 1939–2018), Assia Djebar (Algeria, 1936–2015), Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon, 1948–2019), Heiny Srour (Lebanon, 1945) and Selma Baccar (Tunisia, 1945). Despite hailing from different regions and origins, their careers all started in the 1970s and they are representatives of a historical and countercurrent feminism that gives voice to the stories drowned out by the official history in countries of Arab culture.

The programme includes five of Tahimik’s feature-length films and a “carte blanche” session for the director, as well as Tahimik’s first appearance in film as an actor. Further, the series features debates and in-person conversations with the film-maker and his son, collaborator and leading actor, Kidlat de Guia.

March 8 has become a symbol of protest that flows beyond this date to solidify synergies and feminist, historical and present struggles. For over a century now, this day has condensed and amplified a first basic premise: rights for all women always, every single day. From numerous corners, from the past and the present, we aspire to many more 8Ms — every single day. In this way, this program started in February will be extended until June. 

The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes a video programme created by contemporary Turkish artists, featuring works commissioned by the SALT Contemporary Art Centre — with sites in Istanbul and Ankara — to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the institution. Under the title Ardışık (The Sequential), the programme sketches the scene of the most salient recent art in Turkey and is set forth as a reflection of the major debates taking place in the country.

This fresh edition centres on the first screening in Spain of Mapping Lessons, a film made by Cairo-based film-maker and artist Philip Rizk, who will also be present at the event. The film is a montage of archives on the history of mass uprisings, spanning the Paris Commune in 1871 and more recent examples of self-organisation in Syria.