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July 15th, 2016
The Lumière brothers
La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon [Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, 3rd version], 1895.
Original version, b/w, 42’Jean Vigo
À propos de Nice [Apropos of Nice], 1930
Original version, b/w, 23’Manoel de Oliveira
Nice: À propos de Jean Vigo [Nice: Apropos of Jean Vigo], 1983
Original version, color, 58’The tension and progressive contamination between leisure and work appeared in the founding images of film: La Sortie de l'usine Lumière constitutes theatrical expression, whereby workers stage a fictitious working day on their day off. Vigo approached this quandary by revealing the social and class implications – using the holiday city of Nice, he traced an ill-tempered critique of the new leisure class: the tourist. Fifty-three years on, and as an homage, de Oliveira returned to Nice to add new realities to this complex binomial.
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July 16th, 2016
Jacques Tati
Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot [Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday], 1953
Original version, b/w, 95’By way of his on-screen alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, Tati conveys the pretence and paradoxes in the new tourist class that emerged after the legal acknowledgement of paid holidays. Tourism is presented as machine-like and automated fun i.e. a job: having fun and showing it verifies that the promise held at the beginning of the holiday is seen through.
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July 22nd, 2016
Dino Risi
Il sorpasso [The Easy Life], 1962
Original Version, b/w, 105’Shot during the years of “economic miracle” in Italy, Il sorpasso tells the frenetic story of two seemingly incompatible characters on a madcap trip at the height of the summer holiday season. A timid law student and a hedonistic scrounger, reflections of social dilemmas in Italy, aimlessly travel the country in style.
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July 23rd, 2016
Jean-Luc Godard
Week-end, 1967
Original version, color, 105’Filmed a year before May ‘68, Week-end is a type of premonition with which Godard captured the end of an era. The film provides an acerbic description of the nascent consumer society via one of its most prized objects: the car, a symbol of the status, social class, climbing and influence of a whole economic and political system.
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July 29th, 2016
Josep María Forn
La piel quemada (Burnt Skin), 1967
Original version, b/w, 110’To whom does burnt skin belong? Who is burnt by the sun? Setting out from these questions, Forn focuses on the location of Lloret de Mar, a town undergoing major transformation with the development of tourism. In this town the needs and desires of immigrants, predominantly from Andalusia, are accommodated as they seek employment; the new tourist class and the locals, all under the same blazing sun.
Acknowledgements: Filmoteca de Catalunya (Catalonia Film Institute).
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July 30th, 2016
Frank Perry
The Swimmer, 1968
Original version, color, 95’Adapted from John Cheever’s short story under the same name, The Swimmer portrays the disillusionment, cynicism and decay of the middle and upper class. One day, at the end of summer, Merrill decides to return home by swimming through all the pools in the neighbourhood, thus creating a fictitious river that will progressively take him further away from his goal and the idea of home, and in the process question something deeper: the American dream.
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August 5th, 2016
Jim Jarmusch
Permanent Vacation, 1980
Original version, color, 76’The title of the New York director’s first film refers to the slangy and sarcastic sense of the term layoffs, or collective dismissals. The “vacation” in the title does not allude to free time but rather the time spent over the course of a day by an urban bohemian, a new kind of forced leisure class that becomes alienated in a de-industrialised urban space and finds it impossible to communicate with one another and with the world they have been thrown out of.
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August 6th, 2016
Raoul Ruiz
O território [The Territory], 1981
Original version, color, 104’From a ritualistic and perverse perspective, O território addresses the unavoidable relationship that exists between tourism and cannibalism, between civilisation and brutality. It is the extreme side of a self-cannibalising tourism, an allegorical display of the tourist finding it impossible to explore and get to know the limits of the territory they are visiting and which, on occasions, proves too much for them.
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August 12th, 2016
Dennis O’Rourke
Cannibal Tours, 1988
Original version, color, 67’“There’s nothing so strange, in a strange land, as the stranger who comes to visit it” is the quote that opens this film, which is shot during an excursion to an island inhabited by an ancient tribe of cannibals who are now caught up in producing handicrafts for tourists. This is a key landmark for understanding the complex web on which the tourist industry is built and based, feeding off and nurtured by the desire to discover something original, hidden and paradisiacal.
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August 13th, 2016
José Luis Torres Leiva
Verano [Summer], 2011
Original version, color, 95’An homage to intimate and family holiday films, where distraction gradually becomes a yearning for lost time. The director turns “amateurism” and improvisation into an experimental cinematic reflection; shot in 16 and 35 mm film, the film-maker projects the movie onto a wall and films it again. The recording is the final result: falling between the simplicity of Eric Rohmer and the complexity of experimental cinema.
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August 19th, 2016
Narimane Mari
Loubia Hamra [Bloody Beans], 2013
Original version, color, 77’Presentation by the director of the film together with Elena Oroz
Made in Algeria as the country celebrates fifty years of independence, Loubia Hamra approaches another of the seductive images of summer by definition: the beach. Yet it does so by subverting Western iconography as a symbolic place of rest, exploring it as a space crossed by the trauma of recent history.
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August 20th, 2016
Ion de Sosa
Sueñan los androides [Androids Dream], 2014
VO, color, 61’Set in the futuristic apex of Spanish developmentalism, in Benidorm in 2052, and shot across three Octobers between 2010 and 2014, in this film the ideas that intersect the series are upheld: the transformation and annihilation of space, the influence of the subject-tourist in the territory, the undercurrent of speculation as a driving force of seasonal cities and the world as a huge stage for global tourists, condemned to live without either work or rest. A grotesque, deformed and ascetic version of a devastated present: post-crisis Spain.
Frank Perry. The Swimmer. Film, 1968
Held on 15, 16, 22, 23, 29, 30 Jul, 05, 06, 12, 13, 19, 20 Aug 2016
The open-air cinema is closely linked to summer holidays: a space and time where the working class is freed from work obligations and where the chance for enjoyment and leisure presents itself. Setting out from the concurrence between Thorstein Veblen’s book The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, and the birth of cinema via Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory, the Lumière brothers’ 1895 film, this series, screened on the outdoor terraces of the Museo, offers a journey through the history of the medium, focusing on its relationship with the conception of holidaying, leisure, travel and tourism, through which a whole range of ideas and questions that surface at this intersection are analysed. In other words: the consolidation of a working class freed from work and embodied in the display of social status; the working-class conquest of paid holidays, with the subsequent division between work and unproductive time; or the ensuing appearance of mass tourism at the heart of the social, cultural, economic and even landscape transformations that gave rise to the appearance of the subject-tourist, motivated by the desire to seek different but at the same time identical and uniform experiences. The working-class dream of a permanent vacation, aspiration or condemnation?
Curatorship
Gonzalo de Pedro and Chema González
Más actividades
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.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
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.