-
Friday, 6 April Sabatini Building, Auditorium
First screening
With a presentation by the film-maker
6pm / Sabatini Building, Sabatini Auditorium
Luis Ospina
Acto de fe (Redux), 1970 / 2017
Digital archive, b/w, 17’Todo comenzó por el fin,
Digital archive, colour, 208’ -
Saturday, 7 April Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Second screening
With a presentation by the film-maker
6pm / Sabatini Building, Sabatini Auditorium
Luis Ospina
Acto de fe (Redux), 1970 / 2017
Digital archive, b/w, 17’Todo comenzó por el fin,
Digital archive, colour, 208’
Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo photographed at the beginning of the 1970s, included in Todo comenzó por el fin (It All Started at the End). Film, 2015
Date and time
Held on 06 Apr 2018
This latest instalment of the programme Intervalos (Intervals), devoted to recent experimental and auteur cinema without distribution or release, features the first and last work by Colombian director Luis Ospina in a double bill attended by the film-maker. This Interval is a coda to the retrospective on the artist held in the Museo in 2015, dovetailing a number of the themes explored in the Intervalos programme. The history of Grupo de Cali, the Cali Group, a Colombian avant-garde art and film collective made up of Ospina, writer Andrés Caicedo, film-maker Carlos Mayolo, and artists Ever Astudillo, Fernell Franco and Oscar Muñoz, among others, is explored in the film Todo comenzó por el fin (It All Started at the End, 2015).
The feature-length film paints a self-portrait of Grupo de Cali, also known as “Caliwood”, a group of film buffs who, in the midst of the rumba and chaos of the 1970s and 1980s, managed to produce a corpus of films which would become a key component in the history of cinema. Grupo de Cali parodied the West’s art canon, using cultural reception from underdevelopment to disassemble, reassemble and appropriate the international avant-garde. The kino-eye of Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov materialised in the shape of the critical magazine Ojo al cine, cinéma vérité became the privileged style of the North to represent the misery of the South through gratification, and Italian neo-realism was masked in films of Caribbean vampires, where exploitation intermingled with violence, sarcasm and an insatiable urge to enjoy life. In a similar vein, Todo comenzó por el fin (It All Started from the End) is the clinical story of the film-maker, who became seriously ill while making the film, thus regarding it as an intellectual and personal biography.
Premiered in this double bill, Acto de fe (1970) is a short film which adapts Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story Erostratus, narrating how a man on the verge of despair decides to buy a gun and go out to kill at random. Shot in LA, this was Ospina’s first project at the UCLA Film School, and for which he was awarded First Prize at Bogotá’s Super 8 Film Festival in 1977. The film, as in all Ospina’s subsequent work, melds cult references (“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd,” wrote André Breton) with more mainstream ones, for example Taxi Driver.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Luis Ospina (Santiago de Cali, Colombia, 1949) is a director, producer and film critic. His artistic career is defined by a defence of creative, formal and political freedom, and an irreverent sense of humour towards film, its institutions and the political conditions it is produced within. Ospina studied at the University of South California and formed part of Grupo de Cali with Andrés Caicedo, Carlos Mayolo and Ramiro Arbeláez. His work gave rise to the expression “Caliwood” to refer to the wealth of Cali cinema, and he coined the concept “porno-misery”, which surfaced as a critique of cinema within cinema and the abuse of conditions of underdevelopment and marginalisation in Latin American countries to grab the attention of foreign audiences. His films include Acto de fe (1971), Agarrando pueblo (1977), Pura sangre (1982), Soplo de vida (1999), Un tigre de papel (2007) and most recently Todo comenzó por el fin (2015). Moreover, his work has been shown at the Tate Gallery, the R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Centro Georges Pompidou Centre and Documenta Kassel, among others. He is also the author of Palabras al viento, Mis sobras completas (2007), and since 2009 he has served as the artistic director of the Cali International Film Festival.
Más actividades
Exile and Alienation
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.