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February 21, 2014 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Aki Kaurismäki in conversation with Loïc Díaz-Ronda and Pilar Carrera
This inaugural session offers viewers the chance to analyse, in the company of the filmmaker, the foundational stage of his filmmaking (1983-1996). His work during these years is defined by the irreducible figure of the marginalised worker and the tension between realism and theatricality, characterised by a dense web of references and allusions to modernity in film, the value of the obsolete –in the sense of the dated as opposed to the present and of an objectual world composed of goods without value– and the presence of literature alongside a sense of humour.
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February 22, 2014
Session 1. The Fabled Land
Bico
2004, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 5'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
Calamari Union
1985, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 82'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, HelsinkiWith Calamari Union, his second feature film, Aki Kaurismäki, fragmented into 17 different personalities, sets out on a fatal search for the El Dorado dreamed of by Finnish youth in the mid eighties. Twenty years later, the filmmaker, now meditative and serene, seems to have found it in a peculiar corner of southern Europe that looks nothing like what was expected or dreamed about. This program revolves around the idea of a promised land, of restlessness and rest.
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February 28, 2014
Session 2. Over the Rainbow
These boots
1992, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 5'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
Ariel
1988, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 73'
Classic Films, BarcelonaFrom the 1980s forward, Kaurismäki never ceased to depict the dehumanization of his country. Like the grotesque These Boots, the film Ariel shows the other side of European prosperity, through the exodus and descent into hell of its orphan hero and the hope for a hypothetical redemption somewhere over the rainbow. The second part of his Proletariat Trilogy, dedicated to the "memory of Finnish reality," this film shows, in a cruel and picaresque manner, a post-industrial society based on the sacrifice of workers.
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March 1, 2014
Session 3. Rich Little Bitch
Rich Little Bitch
1987, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 5'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
Crime and Punishment
1983, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 94'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
Crime as a temptation or wish to subvert the social order. With his first feature-length film, a contemporary transposition of the novel by Dostoyevsky, Kaurismäki offered a concise description of a violent moral dilemma. The filmmaker thus began a free and spontaneous relationship with great literary texts, which would culminate some years later with his iconoclastic and anti-literary revival of the Shakespearean tragedy. Rich Little Bitch is a furious fragment of hate and rock'n'roll taken from Hamlet Goes Business. -
March 7, 2014
Session 4. Always Be a Human
Rocky VI
1986, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 9'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
Hamlet Goes Business
1987, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 90'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
In Kaurismäki’s peculiar inversion strategy, the American boxer from Rocky VI cheerfully takes a beating instead of giving it. In these heartless times, an old aristocrat has become a cynical businessman who is about to plunge his inherited industrial empire into a speculative venture. With great clarity and formal beauty, Kaurismäki foretells the systemic crisis of financial capitalism and, in the company of some smoked herring and a bottle of vodka, dreams of the much desired demise of the Western imperialistic act. -
March 8, 2014
Session 5. The Time of the Cherries
The Foundry
2007, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 3'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
The Match Factory Girl
1990, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 69'
Classic Films, Barcelona
Opening with a masterful mechanical ballet, The Match Factory Girl concludes the Proletariat Trilogy and also revives, in a macabre and melodramatic fashion, the nihilistic bent typical of the filmmaker’s early works. Or, how alienation from family and work, combined with the cheap dreams promoted by popular fictions, has liquidated any chance of achieving a true working-class culture. In the short The Foundry, Kaurismäki reinstates the genuine desire of workers in the factory and in the cinema which is, in his mind, one of the last places to remain free, where the imagination can run wild. -
March 14, 2014
Session 6. Don’t Hurry With Me
Those Were the Days
1991, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 5'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
Shadows in Paradise
1986, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 75'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, HelsinkiIn this film, Kaurismäki puts forward a complex vision of romantic relationships, in reaction to a certain deformed view of happiness. For the archetypical character Nikander, the road to love is full of obstacles. The first film of the Proletariat Trilogy, Shadows in Paradise contains all the basic notes found in the director’s musical scale. In it, marginalised characters with good hearts try their best to survive and avoid the shipwreck imposed on them by an indifferent society. Fifteen years later, in the short film Those Were the Days, Kaurismäki tells a story of love at first sight, in the key of poetic realism.
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March 15, 2014
Session 7. You Won’t See a Tear
Dogs Have no Hell
2002, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 10'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana
1994, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 63'
Classic Films, Barcelona
The road movie Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana is a declaration of the love that Kaurismäki, now in voluntary exile, feels for Northern landscapes and the idiosyncrasy of his fellow countrymen. Clumsy and seemingly heartless, the filmmaker’s beloved outsiders fight against a world that is strangely cold and violent, giving priority to values such as altruism, compassion and dignity. A pre-modern code of honour, based on humour and modesty and also on the to and fro of looks and bodies, in which words and language only get in the way. Following this code, in Dogs Have No Hell a man gives a new direction to his life while hardly saying a word. -
March 21, 2014
Session 8. Before I Die
Thru the Wire
1987, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 6'
Courtesy of the Finnish Film Foundation, Helsinki
I Hired a Contract Killer
1990, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 80'
Classic Films, Barcelona
Fleeing or isolating himself leads the kaurismakian hero to his own disappearance. Often, death awaits his characters at the end of their escape. In this session, the codes of film noir provide the director with a tool for reflecting on the tragic destiny of different beings, ones that society considers useless. In I Hired a Contract Killer, the main character lives in an unrecognisable city in England, one that is totally recreated and therefore undefined. This city is simultaneously the setting of a tragedy and an area of great possibilities. As another major character says: the working class have no fatherland. -
March 22, 2014
Carte blanche for Aki Kaurismäki
Clyde Bruckman. Fatal Glass of Beer
1933, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 20'
Park Circus, Glasgow
Nicholas Ray. Bitter Victory
1957, 35mm, original version with Spanish subtitles, 83'
Park Circus, Glasgow
Considered by Godard to be the paradigm of auteur film, Bitter Victory by Nicholas Ray is a complex war drama set in the British campaign in North Africa during World War II. Along with this film, the session includes the short by the comedian W.C Fields, Fatal Glass of Beer, an anarchical parody of melodrama that connects this session with the use of references to and parody of melodrama’s dramatic codes, and also with a particular revision of cinema’s auteur stories, aspects also characteristic of Kaurismäki’s work.
Held on 21, 22, 28 Feb, 01, 07, 08, 14, 15, 21, 22 Mar 2014
This first retrospective of the work of Aki Kaurismäki (Orimattila, Finland, 1957) in a modern art museum complements the Museum’s research into the 1980s as the origins of contemporaneity, but it inevitably surpasses this framework. With a filmography that is the literature and at the same time the image of cinematographic modernity, that is theatrical parody and documentary realism in equal proportions, that links utopia to impotence and humour to tragedy, Kaurismäki’s cinema is based on the paradoxes and fault lines of contemporaneity.
Organised into eight sessions, with a master class and a final carte blanche program of films selected by the filmmaker himself, each session takes the name of a popular song used in the director’s filmography. At the same time, the sessions establish a dialogue between a feature-length film and a short film from this foundational stage, many of which have been recovered, subtitled and screened for the first time in cinema. [dropdown]
Faced with a degrading reality, the main weapon of Aki Kaurismäki’s cinema has been to construct its own cinematographic space as a sphere of resistance. The filmmaker has taken it upon himself to examine, coldly and with indifference, the workings of a society that acts as a machine which shatters the individual. However, Kaurismäki has also proposed in his stories the counterpoint to this idea, and has set counterfires wherever the poorest classes have found refuge and reached a truce of silent solidarity and obstinate love.
With the title After the Shipwreck, this program examines the search for a promised land or a utopian community in the filmmaker’s earliest works. The dialectic between resistance and flight, between everyday violence and the search for utopia, between sordidness and the sublime, is especially present in his early productions. The characters appearing in this early stage are declassed persons – those who clash violently with Finnish society immersed in a neoliberal process of change and “normalization”.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its melancholic nature, these films have a combative political dimension that does not involve dogmas or the teaching of lessons. On the contrary, this dimension can be seen in the matter and the manner of operating in the distribution of the sensible, to use the words of Jacques Rancière, drawing horizons of resistance with the methods of cinema. [/dropdown]
Within the framework of
ARCOmadrid 2014. Finlandia
In collaboration with
Instituto Iberoamericano de Finlandia
Curatorship
Loic Díaz-Ronda
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.
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.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.