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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).
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Robert Capa
Friday, 26 June 2026 – 6pm
This international encounter centred on the figure of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 — Thai Binh, Vietnam, 1954), one of photojournalism’s pre-eminent figures, is held within the framework of the government initiative Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years and in conjunction with a cluster of three locations — the building on number 10 Calle Peironcely, the Plaza del Fotógrafo Robert Capa and the San Carlos Borromeo Parish in Vallecas — declared as a Place of Democratic Memory.
The emblematic photo Robert Capa took in 1936 of this area of Republican Madrid, featuring anonymous children talking in front of a bullet-riddled building attacked by Nazi-fascist air forces, has, in recent years, become a catalyst for impassioned collective action vindicating memory and denouncing the horrors and brutality of wars, past and present.
Within this context, representatives from cultural and academic spheres and civil society organisations from Germany, the USA and Spain discuss the legacy of Capa and photojournalism in European democratic memory, exploring in greater depth two citizen initiatives constructed by Europe from its shared memory: #SalvaPeironcely10 (#SavePeironcely10), in Entrevías (Puente de Vallecas), and the Capa Haus Initiative in the Lindenau neighbourhood of Leipzig, both united by the protection and conservation of historical heritage and by the defence of peace.
The round-table discussion features the participation of Cynthia Young, Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, Ulf-Dietrich Brumann and José María Uría Fernández and is moderated by Myriam Soto Lucas. Carmina Gustrán Loscos, the commissioner of Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years, will also join the discussion.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Inclusive Policies and Practices
19, 20 JUN 2026
In conjunction with World Refugee Day, which takes place on 20 June 2026, Museo Situado and GRIGRI jointly organise this international encounter to foster the discussions, debates and exchange of practices which uphold solidarity with migrant people in European Union countries.
The programme, conceived as a space of exchange and the collective construction of knowledge, comprises a workshop of collaborative creation, discussions, a community meal and a film forum — activities designed by a local committee made up of young people under the age of thirty from different territories in Europe. The policy recommendations on welcoming people with migrant backgrounds and hospitality in urban contexts that arise from this encounter will be presented in Brussels at the end of 2026.
These sessions are developed within the context of the European cooperation project Bridging Borders and are framed inside the tenth anniversary of the GRIGRI Pixel project.