The Reina Sofía’s new film series focuses on Central American Political Cinema from the 1970s and 1980s

• Organised with the Cáder Institute for Central American Art (ICAC) and the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation, with the support of the Costa Rican Film and Audiovisual Centre (CCCA), the film programme comprises three themed sessions under the title Reframing Banana Imagery.
• The series, curated by Alonso Aguilar, explores how Central American political film in these decades appropriated the stigma attached to a “banana republic” as it reclaimed a place in narrations of emancipation and anti-colonisation.  
• Admission to the sessions is free, until full capacity is reached. Tickets can be acquired at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website (a maximum of two per person). Doors open thirty minutes before each screening. 

«República bananera» es un término despectivo usado para nombrar a países políticamente inestables, dependientes de una economía basada en un solo producto y dominados por intereses extranjeros y élites corruptas. Surgido a comienzos del siglo XX en Centroamérica, el concepto hace referencia al poder de multinacionales estadounidenses, como la United Fruit Company, sobre gobiernos, recursos naturales y estructuras económicas de esta región. 

“Banana republic” is a pejorative term used to describe politically unstable countries that are reliant on an economy with a bedrock of one sole product and dominated by foreign interests and corrupt elites. The concept, which surfaced in the early twentieth century in Central America, refers to the power of US multinationals, such as the United Fruit Company, over governments, natural resources and economic structures from the region.

Reframing Banana Imagery sets forth a reencounter with an exceptional time of production in the 1970s and 1980s, when the region’s film-making sought to expand its visual history and became a tool of political and identity-based construction. Along with independent film-makers from inside and outside the region, different organisations, institutions and collectives looked to engage in direct dialogue with the singular nature of their immediate surroundings and with the ardent anti-imperialism sweeping through Central America: the Cinema Department in Honduras; its namesake in Costa Rica; INCINE in Nicaragua; the Experimental Group of University Film-makers in Panama; the Cinematography of Guatemala; and, in El Salvador, the Taller de los Vagos, Cero a la Izquierda and Sistema Radio Venceremos collectives. 

The film season, the second organised jointly inside the working framework of ICAC (the Cáder Institute for Central American Art), is articulated around three programmes which trace an arc running from territorial bases and farming stories to the call to arms and waning insurgency. 

The first programme lays the groundwork of the spectres of agrarian exploitation and the forms of resistance that emerged from the rural environment, the second explores themes such as patriarchal and state violence from dissident expressions in the formal and the political, and the third programme culminates in an epic saga which crosses borders and registers to embody experiences of the armed struggle and the promise of revolution.   

The full programme of the series, which runs from 18 to 27 June, is available on the Museo Reina Sofía website. 

It includes films by María José Álvarez, Patricia Howell, Ramiro Lacayo-Deshon, Paul Leduc, Kitico Moreno, Ingo Niehaus and Taller de los Vagos. 

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