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Monday, 22 January
Session 1
António Reis, Jaime, 1974
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 35´Jaime pays homage to the blurred figure of Jaime Fernandes, a deceased psychiatric patient in Lisbon who leaves behind hundreds of poignant drawings made in the last three years of his confinement. Cordeiro and Reis’s first film does not become ensnared in the usual traps – many of which are compatible – of presenting Jaime as abnormal; in other words, as a patient, not somebody who was imprisoned for thirty-eight years, or as an outsider, not a poor person, as a brut artist and not as a farmer. Following the screening, Manuel Asín, curator of this film series, will develop a presentation on the filmic model of Reis and Cordeiro.
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Tuesday, 23 January
Panel: The image of the people. The cinema of Reis and Cordeiro With the participation of José Manuel Costa, Vítor Gonçalves and Jaime Pena
With the participation of José Manuel Costa, Vítor Gonçalves and Jaime Pena
The work of Reis and Cordeiro has been used to build a genealogy of the prestigious contemporary auteur-cinema in Portugal, also to propose a poetic counter-history of popular cinema, in its dual political and ethnographic meaning. Oblivious to the paternalist praise of poverty during the dictatorship of Salazar, Reis and Cordeiro pose an image of the people inseparable from myth, common knowledge and social history. This panel debates their artistic proposal, with the participation of José Manuel Costa, director of the Portuguese Cinemateca, Vítor Gonçalves, filmmaker, screenwriter, producer and member of the so-called School of Reis, and Jaime Pena, film critic and Head of Programming at the CGAI (Galician Center of Arts of Imaxe).
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Wednesday, 24 January
Session 2
Manoel de Oliveira Acto da primavera [Rite of Spring,], 1962
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 90´António Reis’s first professional work was as assistant director on a film that marked a shift in Manoel de Oliveira’s film-making after twenty-one years of forced silence. The film focuses on the recording of a medieval mystery on the Passion of Christ represented in a small mountain village. This prompted Oliveira to reflect on the conventions of representation and the specific characteristics of words in cinema, and the experience would have a lasting effect on Reis and on his film’s as a director, if only to disassociate himself from it.
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Friday, 26 January
Session 3
Margarida Cordeiro y António Reis Trás-os-Montes, 1976
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 111´The theme running through Trás-os-Montes is the architecture — in the broadest sense of the word —of one of the poorest and remotest regions in Portugal which is becoming depopulated through the emigration of adults to the capital or other European cities. The film offers a panorama of the multiple lifestyles of rural life, in contrast to the fate that looms with progress; the fate of disappearance: cyclical lyricism of traditional imagination under threat from the rhetoric of history.
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Monday, 29 January
Session 4
Margarida Cordeiro y António Reis Ana, 1982
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 114´In Trás-os-Montes the centrepiece was place — in some ways imposing itself on humans — whereas landscape is personified in this film in the figure of Ana, Margarida Cordeiro’s mother. The result is introspection, a collection of mental images tracing a parallel between a symbolic, non-narrative portrait of a character and her environment.
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Wednesday, 31 January
Session 5
Margarida Cordeiro y António Reis Rosa de Areia, 1989
Portugal, 35 mm, colour, 88´“5,000-year flashbacks”, Joris Ivens said about Ana. The film-makers took note and in Rosa de Areia spatial, temporary and symbolic exploration of the region has even broader strokes, with the disproportionate scale of relations — from the cosmic to the microscopic — losing its footing. “A film to see and hear as though it were for the first time, as though it were the first film to come out of the earth and talk about it”, according to Margarida Cordeiro.
Held on 22, 24, 26, 29, 31 Jan 2018
Margarida Cordeiro (1939) and António Reis (1927–1991) are two path-breaking figures in the Portuguese cinema that emerged in the wake of the rebellion of 24 April 1974. Their films, which operated outside the prevailing urban movements taking place, invented a filmic language that was at once poetic and hypnotic, a style and sensibility that would pave a long tradition of radical cinema in Portugal.
In Portugal António Reis is seen as a visionary, a master who had a major influence on the awakening of Portuguese cinema and a new generation of film-makers in the 1980s and 1990s, his poetry previously shining when Manoel de Oliveira invited him and Paulo Rocha to work on his first radical masterpiece, Rite of Spring (1962). The ethnographic and poetic cinema defined by Oliveira and Reis would later impact on the four works Reis directed with his wife, psychiatrist Margarida Cordeiro, which are screened in this series alongside Rite of Spring. The Museo Reina Sofía will, therefore, dig even deeper into the exploration of the auteur cinema that has shaped its programming in recent years, thus setting up continuities and relationships with the comprehensive retrospective on Straub and Huillet – huge admirers of these film-makers – held in 2016.
A large part of the revolutionary cinema in Portugal after Salazar’s dictatorship was markedly urban, yet Cordeiro and Reis emphatically went against the grain, moving away from urban landscapes towards the inland emigration that was distorting the country. With impoverished farm workers arriving in the capital every day after serving in the Colonial War or living in squalor in outlying villages, the film-makers deliberately wandered away from the city, working instead on the material and mythical structure of the remotest region depopulated by those leaving: Trás-os-Montes.
This unequivocal gesture was a provocation: the new democratic leaders had to understand the dialectic between aesthetic wealth and material poverty that determined the ways of life of the people they were representing. The film-makers set out to show how the symbols of the country’s poorest and most afflicted region, the most dispossessed, were those that had manifestly endured over time.
As with the revolutionary hindsight of Straub and Huillet, in Cordeiro and Reis there was a refusal to separate the nascent work from the one refusing to die, and they explored rural microcosms in a way that could be deemed anthropological, despite constituting a heterodox anthropology. In Reis’s words, “nobody can know what’s involved in making a film of this kind. It involves a body-to-body struggle between ancestral and ultramodern forms, between wolves and a Peugeot 504, between Neolithic ploughs and gas cylinders”.
The overlapping scenes form a kind of stratigraphy, with the shots cutting through successive layers of time in history, through everyday time. The work brings to mind the weaving of a mottled tapestry, assembling cloth from different ages, the sequences often operating around a feeling of touch – almost unique in the history of film — and a refinement in the symbolism of colour as an element which can create rhymes and distant relationships. The labyrinthine composition of Cordeiro and Reis’s films, which disorientated and fascinated contemporaries such as Jean Rouch, Joris Ivens and Jacques Rivette, does not abide by fantasies of reality, but rather adheres to the need to reproduce it in a profound, coherent order, “as though time never existed”, as Manoel de Oliveira put it.
This film series presents their work as a whole, described as brief and radical, poetic and popular, decisive and pivotal to the identity of contemporary Portuguese cinema by film-makers such as Pedro Costa, João Cesar Monteiro and João Pedro Rodrigues.
All screenings are in OV with Spanish subtitles.
Curatorship
Manuel Asín
Program
Documentos
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
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.