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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
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.