Central American Designation of Origin
Session 1. Reframing Banana Imagery. Central American Political Cinema from the 1970s and 1980s
Patricia Howell, Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman), 1982, film
Image Archive of the Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre from Costa Rica’s Ministry of Culture and Youth
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.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) and the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation
Acknowledgements
The Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre (CCCA)
Accessible activity
This activity has two spaces reserved for people with reduced mobility
Agenda
jueves 18 jun 2026 a las 19:00
First Session
— With a presentation by Alonso Aguilar, the programme’s curator
jueves 25 jun 2026 a las 19:00
Second Session
— With a recital of Nicaraguan revolution poetry. Selected by Tito Castillo
PROGRAMME
Ingo Niehaus. Costa Rica Banana Republic
Costa Rica, 1975, DCP, colour and black and white, sound, original version in Spanish, 16’. Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre
Ramiro Lacayo-Deshon. Bananeras (Banana Growers)
Nicaragua, 1982, DCP, colour and black and white, sound, original version in Spanish, 13’
Departamento de Cine. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation)
Honduras, 1978, DCP, colour, original version in Spanish, 22’
Patricia Howell. Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman)
Costa Rica, 1982, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Spanish, 42’. Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre
Tráiler Reframing Banana Imagery
Activity within the program...
Reframing Banana Imagery
Central American Political Cinema from the 1970s and 1980s
“Banana republic” is a pejorative term used to describe politically unstable countries that are reliant on an economy with a bedrock of one sole product and dominated by foreign interests and corrupt elites. The concept, which surfaced in the early twentieth century in Central America, refers to the power of US multinationals, such as the United Fruit Company, over governments, natural resources and economic structures from the region. This series, therefore, examines how Central American political cinema from the 1970s and 1980s appropriated this stigma as it reclaimed a unique space in narrations of emancipation and anti-colonisation.
The earliest celluloid recordings of Central America are of “exotic” beauty pageants, odes to the productivity of banana enclaves and the visual propaganda serving dominant military powers. The clichés of the servile day labourer loading up sacks with a smile, the impenetrable otherness of the tropical jungle and the condescendence towards “farmer simplicity” all come from outside images, from the external gaze.
Standing opposite memories fragmented by decades of violence and forgetting, this series sets forth a reencounter with an exceptional time of production in the 1970s and 1980s, when the region’s film-making sought to expand its visual history and became a tool of political and identity-based construction. Along with independent film-makers from inside and outside the region, different organisations, institutions and collectives looked to engage in direct dialogue with the singular nature of their immediate surroundings and with the ardent anti-imperialism sweeping through Central America: the Cinema Department in Honduras; its namesake in Costa Rica; INCINE in Nicaragua; the Experimental Group of University Film-makers in Panama; the Cinematography of Guatemala; and, in El Salvador, the Taller de los Vagos, Cero a la Izquierda and Sistema Radio Venceremos collectives.
The series comprises three programmes which trace an arc running from territorial bases and farming stories to the call to arms and waning insurgency. The first programme lays the groundwork of the spectres of agrarian exploitation and the forms of resistance that emerged from the rural environment. The second rises up to approach the body as a battlefield, where patriarchal and state violence are explored via dissident expressions in the formal and the political. The third programme culminates in an epic saga which crosses borders and registers to embody experiences of the armed struggle and the promise of revolution.
This filmic undertaking seeks to reactivate buried conversations on how these images engendered forms of organisation and collective desire that still resonate in present-day Central America. Rather than an archive-based archaeology, it seeks an active dialogue, where the grammars of the films move through the lyrical, the visceral, the didactic and the insurgent, and always with the intention of reframing official history from the margins.
Ver programaCentral 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.
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.
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.
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.