Film and Video

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.

Intervals is a regular programme which premieres film work that lies beyond the Museo Reina Sofía’s mainstream circuit. This new edition centres on New Sevilles, a feature made by film-maker Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) and artist and researcher Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, Huelva, 1964) which was awarded the Prize for Best Film (Ex Aequo) in the New Waves – No Fiction section of the 18th Seville Film Festival and drifts around the Spanish city through history and to the contemporary beat of flamenco.

This cycle showcases a selection of USA's indepedent black film through an antropological retrospective organized by Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española that, for the first time, compiles a century of film directed exclusively by afroamerican film-makers.

Filipino film-maker and artist Kidlat Tahimik (Baguio, 1942) presents his latest film Balikbayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment Redux IV, a new edit of a project spanning thirty years on the circumnavigation of the Earth and Western accounts of the “discovery” of the New World. The artist will also take part in an online encounter with Sara Nadal-Melsió, organised by Museo Reina Sofía and the King Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University (NYU-KJCC).

Cinema has spent a century or more informing about happiness and, in the sense of shaping, modelling imaginaries and desires. This film series assembles twelve feature-length, medium-length and short films that bear witness to a form of little-known happiness — public happiness — and is set forth in connection with the documentary exhibition under the same title, comprising a diptych devoted to the citizen ideal and social utopia.

But Tomorrow the Light Will Be for Others. Film and Indigenous Lives encompasses a broad chronological arc that spans from 1970 to 2020, from the indiscriminate massacre known in Latin America as ethnocide to the Zapatista delegation’s recent journey from the Chiapas jungle to Europe’s major cities; a journey which seeks to rediscover models of co-existence and good living for a worn-out West.

This programme seeks to put forward dialogue between the Zapatista, European and Global South experiences of self-government. The encounter sets in motion questions around institutionality, care, economies, redistribution, and radical teaching as a form of insurgent imagination decolonised from Eurocentric notions of utopia, and with the capacity to break the hegemony of present and future capitalist visions.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s annual summer cinema returns once again, focusing this year on rediscovering a central part of African cinema which, by way of the strength of its fiction, challenges the images with which the West tries to invade it.

Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid, an international film festival promoted by Madrid’s City Council, present a retrospective on Luke Fowler (Glasgow, 1978), a celebrated British artist, film-maker and musician. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012, Fowler explores the relationship between subject and archive, memory and history through the possibilities afforded by experimental cinema.

Once again, the Museo Reina Sofía participates in the annual International Museum Day —celebrated internationally since 1977 — under the 2021 slogan proposed by ICOM (the International Council of Museums) of “The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine”, and thus prompts a reconsideration of the idea of a living, open institution.

This audiovisual series pivots on cinema’s future imagining with films made between 1920 and 2020, an historical expanse of one hundred years in which the future is manifested as an idea at odds with progress conceived as dogma, as a radical critique of the present, and as a yearning for new worlds. What are the imagined futures in the past and which future is projected and desired in our present? 

Territorio Doméstico: Politicising Aprons, Pots and Streets is a documentary audiovisual piece that records the history of the make-up and struggle of the feminist collective Territorio Doméstico, a group of domestic workers who live in the Community of Madrid but come from all over the world.