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September 27, 2013
Session 1
6:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Carlos Muguiro. The other cinema and the cinema of the other
In 2001 Alejandro Amenábar's film The Others became the biggest box-office smash in the history of Spanish film and seemed to point to the new “uninhibited and international” road that would be taken by the first generation of filmmakers of the 21st century. Ten years later, the phrase ‘the others’ refers, paradoxically, to a cinematographic regeneration that has conspicuously little in common with the earlier proposal. It could be said that, at this point in time, ghosts are what really inhabit the house of Spanish film. Referring to the new paths of Spanish cinema as "the other cinema" revives one of the avant-garde's traditional concepts: that of otherness, understanding this term - following Octavio Paz - as strangeness, stupefaction, paralysis of the mind: astonishment. The question asked by this encounter is whether ‘the other Spanish cinema’ is really a cinema of ‘otherness.’
7:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Jean Pierre Rehm. The new forms of documentary
8:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Carlos Muguiro and Jean Pierre Rehm
Round table
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September 28, 2013
Session 2
6:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Miquel Martí Freixas. Spaces for criticism, dissemination and visibility. Some questions for the futureIn Spain, for over a decade now considerable audiovisual activity has been taking place outside of industrial production, partly as the legacy of past eras. This “new” realm of audiovisuals is emerging thanks to the digital media and it is becoming known thanks to the internet, where pioneering spaces for criticism and dissemination are appearing. For the first time, coinciding with the crisis in cultural models, attention is being paid to it, which is helping put this broad, and sometimes contradictory, audiovisual space at a junction that has yet to be defined.
7:00 - 8:15 p.m.
Training, visibility and circuits
Round table with Andrés Duque and Elías León Siminiani. Moderated by: Laura Gómez Vaquero
Master programs in documentary creation, independent film production companies, specialised film festivals, cinemas, cultural spaces, museums, art centres, digital dissemination and exhibition platforms, and even a few social networks… The production, promotion, distribution and legitimation of a certain documentary cinema with an experimental bent involves the use of a wide variety of places and strategies. This encounter with Andrés Duque and Elías León Siminiani, who at this time are two of the most emblematic filmmakers of this “other cinema”, reveals some of the most important keys to understanding the new (and old) realms in which it moves.
8:15 - 9:00 p.m.
Questions and answers: Andrés Duque, Elías León Siminiani, Miquel Martí Freixas and Laura Gómez Vaquero
Held on 27, 28 sep 2013
Film on the margins, from the peripheries, and the other cinema are among the terms used to refer to works that have been made outside the industry in recent years in Spain. Beyond this condition of existence, a number of additional criteria are fulfilled by these films, suggesting something of a group identity. More specifically: independent production and distribution platforms, the incorporation of the experimental language used in the field of art (exhibition video and film) and the liberal use of documentary techniques in the form of essay film are some of the features found throughout this other cinema. Although they lack a unifying element and have uneven institutional recognition, these films have made quite a solid appearance on the scene, receiving recognition at both art centres and at international festivals, right when the audiovisual industry finds itself faced with the dilemma of whether to choose profitability, as the only means of survival.
This seminar, produced by ICAA and Museo Reina Sofía, brings together, for two days of study, some of the most relevant actors in the field. At the same time, the seminar is linked to the recently-programmed series Urgencies of contemporaneity (2012) and Unending stories (2013), both of which explored this new cinematography.
Organised by
ICAA and Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Carlos Muguiro. Artistic director of the Festival Punto de Vista de Navarra from 2006 to 2009, Muguiro also helped found this event in 2005. Author of, among other publications, Jardines de la visión, Aguaespejo granadino y el avant-garden cinematográfico (in : desbordamiento de Val del Omar, 2011), Ver sin Vertov : una introducción a cincuenta años de cine de no-ficción ruso y soviético (1954-2004) (2005), El hombre sin la cámara: el cine de Alan Berliner (2002) and El cine de los mil años: una aproximación histórica y estética al cine documental japonés (1945-2005) (2005).
Jean Pierre Rehm. Director since 2002 of the International Documentary Film Festival of Marseilles, one of the most important venues for international recognition of the new forms of documentary. Also, author and participant in exhibition projects such as Hotel Europa (2003), Peter Friedl (2006) and Political Typographies: Visual Essays on the Margins of Europe (2007).
Miquel Martí Freixas. Editor and founder of Blogs&Docs, an independent platform for debate and criticism about the other cinema. Critic and programmer, he teaches documentary film at the Film and Audivisual School of Catalunya (ESCAC).
Andrés Duque. The work of Andrés Duque shows a subjective narrative without a defined voice, built from the distance provided by continual experimentation with precarious images, found footage and the direct cinema style with which his films are constructed. His Final Essay for Utopia inaugurated the recent series Urgencies of Contemporaneity.
Elías León Siminiani. The author of cinema characterised by first person narratives as a mechanism for interrogating the world, Siminiani has built a fictional document that is carefully measured and has unexpected appeal to general audiences. In addition, his works, both the successive series Conceptos clave del mundo moderno and features such as Mapa, have received considerable international recognition.
Laura Gómez Vaquero. A professor of film at Universidad Camilo José Cela, Gomez has worked with recent Spanish film on a practical level (as the programmer of series and member of the advisory committee of Documenta Madrid in its last four editions) and also on the theoretical level, through her research activity. With respect to the latter, of particular importance are her publications Piedra, papel y tijera. El collage en el cine documental (co-ordinated with Sonia García López, Documenta Madrid, 2009) and Las voces del cambio. La palabra en el documental durante la transición en España (Documenta Madrid, 2012).
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.