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Wednesday, 12 April 2023 – 7pm / Second session: Wednesday, 19 April 2023 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Xhanfise Keko. Tomka dhe shokët e tij (Tomka and His Friends)
Albania, 1977, b/w, original version in Albanian with Spanish subtitles, DA, 79’
Tickets― With a presentation in the first session by Chema González, head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Cultural and Audiovisual Activities, and Denise Keko Andoni, the granddaughter of Xhanfise Keko and an active promoter of the film-maker’s legacy
Tomka and his friends play on a football pitch until, one day, the Nazis invade their town and use the field to store ammunition. The spectacle of war erases childhood play, but Tomka and his cohorts are unwilling to accept the situation and plot to recover this Nazi-occupied playing field. Keko uses the adventure to speak of partisan resistance in the Second World War on a historical level, as well as resilience in contemporary Albania under the hard-line Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha. On the surface, a film, shot in black and white, that appears simple and naturalistic but possesses great poetic power.
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Friday, 14 April 2023 – 7pm / Second session: Thursday, 27 April 2023 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Xhanfise Keko. Mimoza llastica (Fanciful Mimoza)
Albania, 1973, b/w, original version in Albanian with Spanish subtitles, DA, 42’
Tickets― With a presentation in both sessions by Ilir Keko, Xhanfise Keko’s son and a journalist on Albanian Radio and Television
Mimoza llastica (Fanciful Mimoza), part of a diptych with Kryengritje në pallat (Revolt in the Palace, 1972), is a surreal fable in which broken toys come to life and carry out a summary judgement on the two children who have destroyed them. Mimoza is a girl who doesn’t want to share her toys, ruins playground games and is known as the “spoiled brat”. However, she starts to feel lonely and notices that she misses the joy that comes with playing in a group. Regretful, Mimoza begins a transformation until she re-joins the group of friends and they all play together in the playground. This depiction of bad manners sits alongside desolate visions of the contemporary city and features powerful portraits through the masterly editing Keko learned in Moscow between 1950 and 1952.
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Saturday, 15 April 2023 – 7pm / Second session: Friday, 28 April 2023 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Xhanfise Keko. Beni ecën vetë (Beni Walks on His Own)
Albania, 1975, b/w, original version in Albanian with Spanish subtitles, DA, 78’
Tickets— With a video presentation in both sessions by Thomas Logoreci, editor, producer and writer, and a co-founder of The Albanian Cinema Project, a platform for the conservation and dissemination of Albanian cinema
Beni’s overprotective parents don’t let him play in the street and he loses touch with daily life. His uncle comes from his village to rescue him and take him back there to spend the summer holidays. Beni subsequently connects with nature and gradually returns to real life in this tale of personal growth and transformation. Beni is played by Herion Spiro Mustafaraj, a boy selected out of more than 4,000 seven- to eight-year-olds from state schools, making him a mythical figure in Albanian cinema. The film is also one of the most sensitive explorations of the need to protect childhood from the obligations and dependencies of the adult world.
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Monday, 17 April 2023 – 7pm / Second session: Saturday, 29 April 2023 – 7pm Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Xhanfise Keko. Taulanti kërkon një motër (Taulant Wants a Sister)
Albania, 1984, colour, original version in Albanian with Spanish subtitles, DA, 75’
Tickets— With a video presentation in both sessions by Regina Longo, film historian, programmer and lecturer at Brown University, and a co-founder of The Albanian Cinema Project, a platform for the conservation and dissemination of Albanian cinema
Along with Kur po xhirohej një film (While Shooting a Film, 1981), which deals with divorce, Taulanti kërkon një motër (Taulant Wants a Sister) is another film in which Keko addresses controversial and taboo issues in Albanian society. In this instance, she shines a light on the large number of one-child families, particularly among the upper class. Taulant tries to convince his parents, two intellectuals, of his solitude. But with both unaware and unresponsive to his fixation, the boy decides to take charge of the situation, saving up and going to a maternity ward to buy a little sister. After producing this sensitive and satirical work, Keko was forced to stop making films due to health issues, leaving behind a film corpus aptly summed up in her own words: “The deeper you go into the world of children, the more you learn, regardless of previous experience. In their world, I always believe we are all apprentices”.
![Xhanfise Keko en el set de Beni ecën vetë [Beni camina solo], ca. 1975. Cortesía de Skandal Production](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/keko-general-snippet.png.webp)
Held on 12, 19, 26 abr 2023
A number of pre-eminent film-makers like Jean Vigo, François Truffaut and Abbas Kiarostami have made films about childhood, but few have forged such a coherent body of work as Xhanfise Keko (Albania, 1929–2007). Keko, a peerless film-maker who made eleven fictional features between 1972 and 1984 in Albania, explored the challenges, frustrations and aspirations of children. This retrospective, the first in Spain and one of the few organised internationally, includes four of her — recently restored — films, screened in double sessions.
With an extraordinary sensibility, Keko depicted the world and point of view of children by giving their desires and psychology prominence. This means understanding childhood not as a transitional phase to another age but as a period in itself, respecting children’s independence exactly as René Schérer defined the philosophy of pedagogy. The film-maker worked with child non-actors, boys and girls selected expressly for her films who build relationships with professional actors. At the same time, her practice contributed to transforming the methodical work of the actor into a playful and spontaneous activity, in line with Lev Vygotsky’s theory of learning through play: scripts were always read by the child participants, without the supervision of adult tutors, and could later be re-written on the basis of their comments. Her film sets were an open space of play involving the whole crew; the filming, always swift, looked to adapt to children’s short attention spans; the camera, always placed at their height, respected the way they perceived the world. In short, a whole series of measures to ensure that childhood was not only a theme in the films, but also a creator.
Keko’s filmography, shaped by her status as a working woman in 1970s and 1980s communist Albania, had to navigate censorship and underwent strict regulations. Nevertheless, through the grammar of her film-making she was able to explore taboos and hugely controversial themes during those years, for example divorce in Kur po Xhirohej një film (While Shooting a Film, 1981); a society of only children in Taulanti kërkon një motër (Taulant Wants a Sister, 1984); or bad manners in the Albanian upper class in Mimoza llastica (Fanciful Mimoza, 1973) and Kryengritje në pallat (Revolt in the Palace, 1972). The fables and metaphors of a child’s world allowed her not only to overcome this censorship but also to represent, on-screen, the dreams of a different world for a new generation. Despite her achievements, Xhanfise Keko remains an obscure figure in the history of film — the reason behind this series taking place.
Curator
Chema González
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and NUMAX
Acknowledgements
Denise Keko Andoni
![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.