-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
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.