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24 March, 2014
Luchino Visconti. Rocco and His Brothers
Film, 1960. Projection format: 35mm. Original Version, Subtitled. 168’
Rosebud Films, Madrid
The Parondi family arrive in Milan. Following the death of the father, they leave their town, Luciana, in southern Italy, so the sons can find work in the big city. The script was first devised as a novel, and after an introduction called The Mother (which wasn’t filmed), the plot is weaved together over five chapters, each one named after one of the five sons (Vincenzo, Simone, Rocco, Ciro, Luca). -
26 March, 2014
Ritwik Ghatak. Subarnarekha
Film, 1962. Projection format: 35mm. Original Version, Subtitled. 143’
British Film Institute, LondonA native to East Bengal, Ghatak forms part of the millions of refugees that were forced to return to Calcutta when India's Declaration of Independence gave rise to the creation of Pakistan, in 1947. Subarnarekha (1962) is, together with The Hidden Star (1960) and Komal Gandhar (1961), the third part of the so-called Partition Trilogy. Of the three films, Subarnarekha is the most lyrical and the one that most radically condenses the metaphors of Partition: History interrupted, escape and betrayal.
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31 March, 2014
Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Barren Lives
Film, 1963. Projection format: DVD. 103’
Regina Filmes, Rio de JaneiroAs the title itself intimates, the geographical and social conditions determine a way of life and storytelling. A family of farmers are uprooted from their home because of a drought and cross through the country's interior, the sertao (or dry hinterland), on foot. Luckily the rain enables them to stop for a while in a fazenda (farm). The head of the family, Fabiano, is a victim of police persecution and is imprisoned and beaten. He later meets his tormentor, alone, but refuses to seek vengeance. The family set off once again as they search for means of survival.
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2 April, 2014
Djibril Diop Mambéty. Touki Bouki
Film, 1973. Projection format: Digibeta. Original Version, Subtitled. 89’
Copy from the Foundazione Cineteca di Bologna, restored in 2009 by the World Cinema Project in the Cineteca di Bologna/Laboratorio L’Immagine Ritrovata
Rights Maag Daan Crossmedia, Dakar
Touki Bouki prolongs the tension between a pastoral world and the conditions of urban living, yet also marks a turning point. The politicisation of African cinema went hand in hand with national liberation movements, utilizing Marxist critique of the imperialist domination. Mambéty’s inspiration comes not only from the Nouvelle Vague, but also eccentric forms regarding norms of political cinema. Touki Bouki transforms a biographical drama into fable, halfway between lyricism and parody, but does not end with a lesson in morality. -
7 April, 2014
Robert Kramer and John Douglas. Milestones
Film, 1975. Projection format: 35mm. Original Version, Subtitled. 195’
Copy restored in 2008
Capricci Films, Nantes
Milestones is an immersion in and a stroll around the America of counter cultures in the period that follows the US defeat in Vietnam, with an armistice being signed in 1973. The film is a documentary assemblage blended with sequences of drama, a kaleidoscope of life situations, often accompanied by monologues or long conversations. Within this palimpsest Milestones demonstrates how cinema continues to work on its own emancipation, despite the connection with social struggles being broken. -
9 April, 2014
Chantal Akerman. News from Home
Film, 1976. Projection format: DVD. Original Version, Subtitled. 85’
Paradise Films, Brussels
News from Home describes an autobiographical situation. A young woman living in New York receives news of her family in Brussels. She reads her mother’s letters aloud in a monotonous litany; the voice-over of the reader, at times drowned out by the sounds of traffic, is inserted at regular intervals in a montage of static and long panoramic shots. A distant day-to-day expressed in simple and stereotyped language, with no literary quality, interacts with the contemplative images of Manhattan taken by Babette Mangolte. -
21 April, 2014
Rithy Panh. Site 2
Film, 1989. Projection format: Digibeta. Original Version, Subtitled. 92’
JBA Production, Paris
Yim Om talks about her life from a Cambodian refugee camp on the Thai border; she says: This month, in the cold season, I feel nostalgia for our town, where we lived in freedom. Deep down we only think about this, without knowing who to tell it to. Site 2, Rithy Panh’s first film, shows a broken and disorientated life that is given back some direction by the story and piercing voice narrating it. -
23 April, 2014
Amos Gitai. Wadi 1981-1991
Film, 1991. Projection format: Blu-Ray. Original Version, Subtitled. 97’
Agav Films, Paris
The first Wadi was filmed in 1981 in one of the (wadi) valleys that characterises the site of Haifa, the film-maker’s home city. Wadi Rushmia is an old stone quarry that, despite being abandoned in the 1940s, is still invaded, this time at the beginning of the 1980s by a heterogeneous and marginalised community; the first film describes this living enclave. Gitai returned to these places ten years later. Composed of these two visits, Wadi 1981-1991 joins fragmented life stories that reveal the complex, and often invisible, coexistence between Jewish and Palestinian communities. -
28 April, 2014
Pedro Costa. In Vanda’s Room
Film, 2000. Projection format: Betacam. Original Version, Subtitled. 170’
Courtesy of the director and Optec, Lisbon
The room invaded by the camera is the refuge of a young drug addict called Vanda, inside the family home in a working-class neighbourhood in Lisbon that is being demolished. The young woman’s self-destruction corresponds to the destruction of the area around her, Fontainhas, and was filmed using static shots that appear to withstand the demolition. But these shots are unstable and subjected to the slightest stirrings of the character and the environment. The present resists while on the verge of catastrophe, on the threshold of extinction. -
30 April, 2014
Mati Diop. Mille soleils
Film, 2013. Projection format: Blu-Ray. Original Version, Subtitled. 45’
Cinenomada
The film begins with the image of a herd of horned cows, at a crossroads in Dakar, led by an old man. Mati Diop is the niece of Djibril Diop Mambéty, who died in 1998. Forty years on from the filming of Touki Bouki, the film-maker meets the two actors and and finds that both have followed their character’s destiny. Mille soleils combines a kind of elegy with elements of social documentary.
Moments in Life. Biography in Film Discourse (1960-2013)
Held on 24, 26, 31 mar, 02, 07, 09, 21, 23, 28, 30 abr 2014
This film program shows the diversity of biographical situations, individual and collective situations addressed in cinema since the early 1960s. The programming, of an historical nature, links the transformation of biographical forms to a history of cinematic memory as the ten films reflect three time periods. The last, Mille soleils (A Thousand Suns, 2013), adds the recollection of a film from the second period – the legendary Touki Bouki (1973) – in a retrospective examination governed by a link to kinship.
The screenings begin with Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, first shown in 1960. At a point that shifts decisively towards the Nouvelle Vague, the Brazilian film-maker Glauber Rocha displaces the angle of approach: through Rocco, Visconti adds a chapter to the controversial film versus fiction, conferring the dimension of the novel on the world of cinema. Thus, Rocha related the grand form of cinematic drama to the condition of the wretched of the Earth (the eponymous book by Frantz Fanon that appeared in the same year), in other words, to a multitude of lives without biography. Subarnarekha, by Bengali film-maker Ritwik Ghatak, the film Barren Lives, by Brazil’s Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Touki Bouki by Senegalese film-maker Djibril Diop Mambéty, respond and correspond to Rocha’s position, as well as questions raised by Visconti.
A life without properties, in its double meaning without ties or a way out, which cannot be told or transformed in a coherent account, comprises the second period. The collapse of a large collective project brings about a similar effect of loss and expropriation. In 1975 in the United States, Milestones, a film by Robert Kramer and John Douglas, takes stock, in a somewhat disillusioned way, of the militant paths that were formed during the social movement struggles against Vietnam war. The intimate and dedramatised News from Home (1976) complements Milestones, with Chantal Akerman, who had gone to live in New York, giving voice to her mother’s repetitive letters.
Rithy Panh, Amos Gitai and Pedro Costa make up the third historical sequence. The documentary Site 2 dates back to the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A female Cambodian refugee that flees from Pol Pot’s regime of terror tells her story– an example of cinema on the listening. Likewise, violence and exclusion form the backdrop of the two other films. In Wadi, Amos Gitai describes a refuge for lives at the margin, while Costa’s film is portrayed as a documentary, despite the scenes featuring the main character, Vanda, were staged. The room is a place suspended in a void with no future; however, this suspension is also a type of spell that, without diminishing violence, transfigures naturalism.
Curatorship
Jean-François Chevrier
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
Estrella de Diego Lecture. Holding Your Brain While You Sleep
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.