Activities

This edition is devoted to de caballos y guitarras (Of Horses and Guitars, 2024), the latest feature-length film by artist, curator and researcher Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, Huelva, 1964), who will also present the film in both sessions. After the screening in the first session, the artist will take part in a discussion with the audience, while the second showing will be followed by a concert performed by Raül Refree and Alfredo Lagos.

Mariano Llinás, one of the most original and salient figures in recent cinema, returns after his epic La flor (The Flower, 2018) with a metafictional piece on family, memory and art history. The film explores the process of producing a biographical documentary around the figure of the illustrious architect Clorindo Testa (1923–2013), a friend of the film-maker’s father, the poet and art critic Julio Llinás. In between, akin to a frenetic detective story, suspense, politics, autobiography and, above all, humour convene in what is also an underlying reflection on what film is and what are, if they are actually of use, the narrations the director puts forward.

The centrepiece of this new edition is Mamántula (2023), by Ion de Sosa (Urnieta, Gipuzkoa, 1981), a fictional feature-length film on the freedom of desire which blends psychosexual thriller, gay porn and science fiction. The screening includes a presentation and talk by the director in both sessions.

This fresh edition shows the national premiere of Man in Black (2023) by Wang Bing (China, 1967), a documentary feature film on memory, truth and the power of music from the biography of composer Wang Xilin (China, 1936). The director will also present the film and participate in the conversation that follows the screening.

This fresh edition of Interval presents El agua (Water, 2022), a feature film by Elena López Riera (Spain, 1982), accompanied by Las vísceras (Entrails, 2016), a short film on the ritual and attraction of daily rural life. López Riera, with a filmography straddling gruesome realism and magical thinking, has established herself as one of the most original voices in new Spanish cinema. 

The Museo Reina Sofía’s ongoing programme of film premieres, Intervals, shows recent works made either during the year in progress or the previous one. This fresh edition is devoted to Charlotte Wells (Scotland, 1987), 2022’s standout film-maker for her debut feature Aftersun (2022), a beautiful and melancholy reflection on family relationships, the real and imaginary dimension of memories and the passing of time.

This latest edition of Interval presents Eami (2022), a film by Paz Encina (Paraguay, 1971) which, through magic realism, narrates the Indigenous conception of the world and the massacre of nature at the hands of financial exploitation. The film won the Tiger Award for Best Feature Film at the 51^st International Film Festival Rotterdam.

This fresh edition welcomes film-maker Irene M. Borrego’s film La Visita y Un Jardín secreto (The Visit and a Secret Garden), the winner of awards at the Málaga Film Festival, Documenta Madrid and Doclisboa in 2022. The film centres on Isabel Santaló, a Spanish painter whose career remains shrouded in obscurity. The screening is accompanied by a talk with the director and a special guest in each session: Lola Hinojosa and Antonio López, respectively.

This fresh edition centres on the first screening in Spain of Mapping Lessons, a film made by Cairo-based film-maker and artist Philip Rizk, who will also be present at the event. The film is a montage of archives on the history of mass uprisings, spanning the Paris Commune in 1871 and more recent examples of self-organisation in Syria.

Intervals is a regular programme which premieres film work that lies beyond the Museo Reina Sofía’s mainstream circuit. This new edition centres on New Sevilles, a feature made by film-maker Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) and artist and researcher Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, Huelva, 1964) which was awarded the Prize for Best Film (Ex Aequo) in the New Waves – No Fiction section of the 18th Seville Film Festival and drifts around the Spanish city through history and to the contemporary beat of flamenco.

This new edition of the Intervals programme centres on two recent films which explore how to make cinema by experimenting with performance and with the role and purpose of the actor. The programme is made up of Un diálogo circunstancial (A Circumstantial Dialogue, 2019), the second film by artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, co-directed with film-maker and historian Luis Deltell, and Derechos del hombre (Rights of Man, 2018), a feature-length film by Juan Rodrigáñez, made in collaboration with a group of artists and performers.

Happy Lamento is the latest film by Alexander Kluge (Halberstadt, Germany, 1932), one of the great intellectuals and film-makers of our time, made in collaboration with Philippine film-maker and enfant terrible Khavn de la Cruz (Quezon City, 1972).

O que arde (Fire Will Come, 2019) takes centre stage in this edition of Intervals, a series devoted to screening recent film productions. The film, a story of containment and the wish for destruction based on the life of an arsonist, won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes 2019. Its director, Oliver Laxe, will present the first session and hold a talk after the screening.

This new edition of Intervals, a screening series centred on recent film work, presents the latest film by J.P. Sniadecki (USA, 1979), made in collaboration with Joshua Bonnetta (Canada, 1979). As a member of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, J.P. Sniadecki melds experimental film with ethnographic research, analyses of the film medium and immersive experiences.

The Intervals series, which screens recent film work, welcomes one of the most arresting and poetic feature-length films in recent years, The Portuguese Woman by Rita Azevedo Gomes (Lisbon, 1952), a director who prolongs that constant tension between experimentation and narrative film-making in her work. 

This new session inside Intervals, a programme which screens recent film work, presents Oscuro y lucientes (Dark and Lucientes), the fourth feature by Samuel Alarcón (Madrid, 1980). The film is one of the most fascinating and original works on Francisco de Goya.

The latest edition of Intervals, a programme which screens recent film work, presents An Opera of the World by film-maker and cultural theorist Manthia Diawara (Bamako, Mali, 1953). The film melds opera and documentary genres, reflecting on the historical relationship of migration and displacement between Africa and Europe in successive refugee crises.

This latest instalment of the Intervals programme, which screens recent film work, welcomes the first feature-length film by artist and film-maker Filipa César (Porto, Portugal, 1975). Spell Reel (2017) constitutes a reflection on the political history of West Africa, made from precarious film archives of the colonial emancipation of Guinea-Bissau, giving rise to an open question raised on how to write the history of those who have been driven out of the present and the role bygone remnants can play in shaking up our contemporaneity.  

I diari di Angela. Noi due cineasti (Angela’s Diaries: Two Film-makers) is a posthumous homage from Yervant Gianikian (1942) to his lifelong partner and artistic companion Angela Ricci-Lucchi (1942–2018), in a final elegy and poetic act of love following her sudden death in 2018.

This edition of Intervals, a series which screens and presents recent films, features The Spy Within, a documentary essay on friendship and betrayal during the Years of Lead in Spain and terrorism in the Basque Country. The film narrates the relationship between Juan Gutiérrez, a mediator between the Spanish State and ETA, and his closest collaborator, Roberto Flórez, who turns out to be a spy for Spain’s Secret Services. Both sessions feature a presentation and talk by Juan Gutiérrez, the writer Edurne Portela, and the film-makers. 

Queerama reconstructs the history of LGBTIQ+ movements and their representation in film and popular culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, doing so through the vast British Film Institute (BFI) archive. The film extends across a century of experiences of sexual diversity, encompassing public persecution and prosecution, criminalisation and medicalisation, and also sexual liberation, pride and equality struggles.

This session spotlights film-maker João Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) and his recent film No intenso agora (In the Intense Now, 2017), which revives the international jolt of May’ 68 through the reassembly of now-familiar film archives. Moreira Salles, regarded as one of the foremost exponents of contemporary documentary-making, will present the film via video conference.

This latest instalment of the programme Intervalos (Intervals), devoted to recent experimental and auteur cinema without distribution or release, features the first and last work by Colombian director Luis Ospina in a double bill attended by the film-maker. This Interval is a coda to the retrospective on the artist held in the Museo in 2015, dovetailing a number of the themes explored in the Intervalos programme.

How do the film-makers negotiate the paradoxical side of the painting, between allegory and index? What are the different ‘Guernicas’ that appear in these four essay films?

Within the framework of the programme Intervalos, Museo Reina Sofía screens Political Advertisement IX 1952–2016, an audiovisual project by artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese, to be shown in the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections.

The Intervalos (Intermissions) programme, which shows screenings of recent film work, presents a preview of Andrés Duque’s latest movie, Oleg and Strange Arts. The film moves between biography and performance, bearing witness, through moments in the life of Russian composer Oleg Karavaychuk (1927–2016), to the return of beauty that is at once eccentric, fragile and pathological.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster employs literature to explore the relationship between fiction and reality, and theatre to juxtapose an imaginary narrative of the present. This Intervalos session sees three of her films screened, including Otello 1887, a cinematic opera filmed in the Palacio de Cristal and co-produced by the Museo.

Intervalos is a film programme showing contemporary audiovisual works, Museo's own productions and works that, between the performative and the cinematic, show the new directions of the moving image. This new edition of Intervalos presents Letters to Max, the latest film by Eric Baudelaire

As part of the Intervalos programme, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s latest work is screened, with both film-makers also participating at an encounter. Joining film practices based on found footage, documentary and experimental cinema, Pays Barbare is a complex tale about historical memory, fascism and colonialism.

Premiere of the recent documentary about Hélio Oiticica. Put together as a living archive of numerous unpublished documents, from the artist’s thoughts as a narrative guide to unexplored audiovisual fragments, the film looks to articulate a complex and multiple narrative of the artist and the post-war Avant-garde movement in Brazil.

In this performative lecture, in parallel with the presentation of Minimal Resistance. Between late modernism and Globalisation: artistic practices during the 80s and 90s, Mullican reviews and comments on some of his performances under hypnosis, in which he recreates, as he does in his visual works, the logic of an unstable and irrational world.

News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx/Eisenstein/Capital (2008) is one of the most complex and monumental films of recent film history. Throughout the almost nine hours that the film lasts, its director, Alexander Kluge (Germany, 1932), offers his own construction of Eisenstein's unfinished project of filming Capital by Karl Marx, an idea conceived after a feverish encounter between the Russian filmmaker and James Joyce in 1927.

With his films, Harun Farocki (Czech Republic, 1944) dissects the control, representation and value systems derived from capital and its images. This event, the first of the Intervalos program, shows two recent works, one of which was produced by Museo Reina Sofía, and also includes a lecture by Thomas Elsaesser. 

An Uncomfortable Proposal. Sociología Ordinaria Encounters #11 sets out to address discomfort and its correlations and networks of meaning: significations, impressions and feelings, and how they affect us and also orient and disorient us.

This TIZ addresses the problem areas that approach ecology from relationality. Interactions, relations of intimacy and mutual support, forms of collective intelligence, shared knowledge, involvement in protesting against climate change and community learning are some of the concepts that define the activities, activations, investigations and accompaniments from April through to July in the Museo.

In conjunction with 8M, the Museo organises a transversal programme with a focus on feminisms which, intersected by new present-day demands — the right to health and housing, climate justice — continue to call out different forms of violence that persist in today’s society as they interweave complicities and affection to make new horizons possible.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the first edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which, over two days, brings together presentations in a range of formats (stage pieces, performance lectures, actions, readings, conversations). The programme issues from the research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied directly to or engage in dialogue with the area of choreography and performance.