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18 September, 2013
Eloy Enciso
Arraianos
Technical specifications: 2012. Spain,In Gallician with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 70’.
Screening format: Blu-ray
Between existentialism and scepticism, Arraianos blends a mythical moment with a historical moment. The film appears to reflect on the rapidly disappearing agrarian way of life, using a cinematic language that contains references to Pedro Costa and Straub-Huillet. The Arraianos, the inhabitants of the border region shared by Galicia and Portugal, are, however, a fictional people, the roles being performed by amateur actors that recite, with distance, dialogues taken from the theatrical piece O bosque (1977), by Jenaro Marinhas. Under the pretext of filming an identity, Arraianos shows the discourses that invent such an identity.
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20 September, 2013
Pablo Cayuela and Xan Gómez Viñas
Fóra
The co-director of the film, Xan Gómez Viñas, will be present
Technical specifications:2012. Spain. V.O.S.E. In Galician, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 95'.
Screening format: Blu-ray
The insane asylum: factory or landscape? With this reflection begins this look at the history of the insane asylum located in Conxo and at the institutional repression of insanity. Founded at the end of the 19th century on the outskirts of Santiago, the asylum was the site of one of the most important moments of the anti-psychiatric movement taking place between 1972-1975, when, according to one of the doctors there, “while trying to free the insane, we freed ourselves.” The film, with echoes of Peter Robinson and Joaquim Jordà, is built on a visual atlas of documents that shows the traces of a resistant subjectivity.
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25 September, 2013
Sergio Caballero
Finisterrae
Technical specifications: 2010. Spain. In Polish, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 80’.
Screening format: Betacam digital
With a dense web of references ranging from the Buñuel of La Voie Lactée to the Garrel of La cicatrice intérieure, and including also elements of road movie and music video, Caballero alludes to an accumulative, but not eclectic, state of the image. Finisterrae narrates the adventures of two ghosts who are tired of living and decide to follow the Pilgrim's Road to Santiago in order to regain their mortality. Meanwhile, a number of unconnected situations take place, representative of the search for an extravagant and exaggerated meaning that is able to create amazement once again in response to what is being told.
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26 September, 2013
Albert Serra
Història de la meva mort
The filmmaker will be present. National premiere
Technical specifications: 2013. Spain and France. In Catalan, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 140'.
Screening format: 35 mm
Like the 200 hour-long monologues by Goethe, Hitler and Fassbinder in his previous film, Els tres porquets (2012), here also Serra presents a twilight story based on text and its interpretation. Historia de la méva mort tells of the slow decline of European civilization by using another anachronism, the encounter between an enlightened Casanova and a pre-romantic Dracula. The films suggests that licentiousness as an exercise in autonomy and emancipation of the subject is beginning to be replaced by uncertainty and contemporary superstition.
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2 October, 2013
Sergio Oksman
A story for the Modlins
The filmmaker will be present
Technical specifications:2012. Spain. V.O.S.E. In English, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 26'.
Screening format: Hard disk
The emotional charge of Barthes' punctum in response to the realism of photography is the resource used to tell this story. The film takes place on the line between what is true and what seems to be true, between what images document and what they invent. The discovery of a suitcase full of old photos leads the narrator to a wild tale that starts in the New York apartment seen in Rosemary's Baby and ends in an apartment on Calle Pez in Madrid. A Story for the Modlins shows the sophistication of the poetics of the found material.
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4 October, 2013
Oskar Alegría
La casa Emak Bakia
Technical Specifications: 2012. Spain, in Spanish, colour and sound, 83’
Screening format: Blu-ray
This film, the first feature by Oskar Alegría, is a complex narrative artefact configured around the search for the house where Man Ray filmed Emak Bakia (1926), one of the fundamental surrealist films. At the same time, it is an essay that develops amidst the figurative and material footprints left by the early avant-gardes, and also an inquiry into mystical journeys of initiation where, as if in a theatre of images, the social types of the early 20th century circulate.
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9 October, 2013
Víctor Iriarte
Invisible
The filmmaker will be present
Technical specifications: 2012. Spain. In Spanish, colour and sound, 65’
Screening fomat: Hard disk
Invisible plays in the area between what is shown and what is hidden, between the expectation of what viewers think they will see and what they actually see. The film “illustrates” its argument with segments from the soundtrack's production process. Heavily influenced by performance and video art, this film provides an example of filmmaking based on both listening and seeing. The text, music and narrative intertitles reduce the centrality of the image, and give the spectator renewed protagonism.
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10 October, 2013
Virginia García del Pino
El Jurado
The filmmaker will be present
Technical specifications: 2012. Spain. In Spanish, colour and sound, 60’
Screening format: Blu-ray
Over a period of 60 minutes El Jurado tells the story of a real murder as narrated by lawyers, witnesses and the accused during the trial. However, there is no mise-en-scéne or documentation in images, just close-up views of the pixelated, almost abstract, faces of some members of the jury. The successive reactions in their faces indicate that this film is about the rhetoric of the speaker and the scepticism of the listener, now playing the role of judge.
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16 October, 2013
Óscar Pérez and Mia de Ribot
Hollywood Talkies
The co-director of the film, Mia de Ribot, will be present
Technical specifications: 2011. Spain. In English, with Spanish subtitles, colour and sound, 61'
Screening format: Blu-ray
This film explores fiction within fiction. In the early years of talking pictures, before dubbing, Hollywood decided to expand to the South American market by duplicating its most successful films with Spanish actors. During the years of the Spanish Republic, a large group of actors, screenplay writers and technicians travelled from Spain to Los Angeles to act in these uncanny reproductions, reinforcing paradoxically the Latino stereotypes. The film Hollywood Talkies, based on still photos and shot in the places actually used during the project, is the chronicle of a failure, presented as a ghost story.
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17 October, 2013
Adrià Julià
Negative Inchon (from the Notes on the Missing Oh series)
The artist will be present
Technical specifications: 2012. Toning, no sound, 14’
Screening format: 16 mm
Oh, Inchon!, which premiered briefly as Inchon (1981), is a super production about the 1950 landing of U.S. forces during the Korean War. It is also the story of one of the greatest Hollywood fiascos ever. The film, considered by many to be racist and colonialist, was withdrawn from cinemas and put in a warehouse just a week after release. In the series Notes on the Missing Oh, Adrià Julià explores the film, its context, spaces and discourse, as a story about the limits of the film industry. Negative Inchon is the projection on film of the digital version of Inchon, which was posted on Youtube by an anonymous user and filmed again, in negative, by the artist.
Held on 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 Sep, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 Oct 2013
In recent years, it has been pointed out that one of the identifying features of Spanish alternative film is the exploration of the real. This series, however, looks at the other side, the return to a narrative that, formulated upon the basis of allegory, expropriated stories and the renewed role of the spectator, flows beyond the space of stories.
Fiction, in the logic of film discourse, is usually considered a closed system that presents an airtight world set up by the filmmaker. The film shoot, following this idea, responds to a rigid staging process designed to ensure the translation of the work from screenplay to moving images. In contrast, the ten films chosen for this series challenge this condition which, using the ideas of Noël Burch, might be described as the exile of chance. With a variety of media and enunciations, the selected filmmakers and artists understand fiction to be a multiplication of experience and a cross between the subjectivities that give it meaning, a meaning that is anything but univocal and instead appears in an ongoing state of interrogation. If more orthodox film generally engages in an image fetishism that, in the sense put forward by Benjamin, erases any tie between the image and its means of production, the films included in Unending Stories use images and their narrative with the opposite intention: as a medium for questioning who, how and from which vantage point the story is told. So, here the story is not a life-like mask by which to convey the real, but rather an element with which to broaden the real.
The Unending Stories program looks into different ways of telling. In the first place, there is telling that uses history's fundamental archetypes, such as in the case of Història de la meva mort by Albert Serra and Finisterrae by Sergi Caballero, treated here from the perspective of allegory and the grotesque. Secondly, the telling can use objects found and resignified within the story, such as La casa Emak Bakia, by Oskar Alegría, and A Story for the Modlins, by Sergio Oksman. Thirdly, stories can be told by examining myth as the repetition that builds identity, whether that of a community, as with Arrianos by Eloy Enciso, or of a territory, as with Conxo in Fóra , by Pablo Cayuela and Xan Gómez Viñas. Fourthly, the telling might entail showing the role of the spectator in the construction of a supposed truth derived from the dispute between image and language, such as in El jurado, by Virginia García del Pino, and Invisible , by Víctor Iriarte. And lastly, there is the telling that develops the fiction as an archive from which to excavate the stories buried by the “film” institution, as in Hollywood Talkies by Óscar Pérez and Mia de Ribot and Negative Inchon by Adrià Juliá.
In short, Unending Stories features a series of recent audiovisual works driven by a new type of narrative that, far from exhausting the real, takes it to a new irreducible state.
Itinerancies
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
18 September, 2013 - 17 October, 2013
Palacio de los Condes de Gabia. Diputación de Granada
30 January, 2014 - 27 March, 2014
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.
Robert Capa
Friday, 26 June 2026 – 6pm
This international encounter centred on the figure of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 — Thai Binh, Vietnam, 1954), one of photojournalism’s pre-eminent figures, is held within the framework of the government initiative Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years and in conjunction with a cluster of three locations — the building on number 10 Calle Peironcely, the Plaza del Fotógrafo Robert Capa and the San Carlos Borromeo Parish in Vallecas — declared as a Place of Democratic Memory.
The emblematic photo Robert Capa took in 1936 of this area of Republican Madrid, featuring anonymous children talking in front of a bullet-riddled building attacked by Nazi-fascist air forces, has, in recent years, become a catalyst for impassioned collective action vindicating memory and denouncing the horrors and brutality of wars, past and present.
Within this context, representatives from cultural and academic spheres and civil society organisations from Germany, the USA and Spain discuss the legacy of Capa and photojournalism in European democratic memory, exploring in greater depth two citizen initiatives constructed by Europe from its shared memory: #SalvaPeironcely10 (#SavePeironcely10), in Entrevías (Puente de Vallecas), and the Capa Haus Initiative in the Lindenau neighbourhood of Leipzig, both united by the protection and conservation of historical heritage and by the defence of peace.
The round-table discussion features the participation of Cynthia Young, Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, Ulf-Dietrich Brumann and José María Uría Fernández and is moderated by Myriam Soto Lucas. Carmina Gustrán Loscos, the commissioner of Spain and Freedom. Fifty Years, will also join the discussion.
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.
Inclusive Policies and Practices
19, 20 JUN 2026
In conjunction with World Refugee Day, which takes place on 20 June 2026, Museo Situado and GRIGRI jointly organise this international encounter to foster the discussions, debates and exchange of practices which uphold solidarity with migrant people in European Union countries.
The programme, conceived as a space of exchange and the collective construction of knowledge, comprises a workshop of collaborative creation, discussions, a community meal and a film forum — activities designed by a local committee made up of young people under the age of thirty from different territories in Europe. The policy recommendations on welcoming people with migrant backgrounds and hospitality in urban contexts that arise from this encounter will be presented in Brussels at the end of 2026.
These sessions are developed within the context of the European cooperation project Bridging Borders and are framed inside the tenth anniversary of the GRIGRI Pixel project.