Cinema Commons 

Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.

This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.

L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.  

This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.     

On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes is a film programme overseen by Miriam Martín and Ana Useros, and the first within the project The Cinema and Sound Commons. The activity includes a lecture and two films screened twice in two different sessions: John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and John Gianvito’s The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001).  

“By virtue of a group of film curator enthusiasts, small plazas and vacant lots in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood became cinemas with the arrival of summer. The city streets made room for everyone: the local residents who came down with their seats tucked under their arms, or those who simply came across the Lavapiés Film Festival with no prior knowledge of it, but knowing how to recognise a free and convivial film screening, as enticing as light is to moths. The Festival’s film curators had to first reach a consensus with one another, by assembly, and then with others, addressing issues ranging from electricity to the transfer of rights to show the films. 

Whereas the annually organised Festival resembled a camp, the weekly CSOA (Squatted Self-managed Social Centre) La Morada film society looked more like a settlement. In each squatted social centre, a micro civilisation is founded, and nestled among its infrastructures is always a film society. Why? We’ll see. A direct outcome of the 15M anti-austerity movement, this film society was contentless in form (the content, the films, were decided upon from session to session). Anyone was free to enter, and therefore free to curate the line-up, although not haphazardly — there was a method, ultimately devised so the community would not close, so it would never have one set image of itself.   

Part of this method entailed relating the film from the following week to the recently viewed one, and the same method has gone into putting together this two-session programme. The Festival and the film society were, moreover, attempts at rectification: the festival logic and the very same film-club logic, according to which film boils down to an excuse for debating serious issues. There would be nothing to debate but much to ponder. For instance, about the manufacturing of enemies by a nation that chooses enemies in the world, with one film from the year the State of Israel was proclaimed and another from the year the Twin Towers were razed to the ground. The USA manufactures functional enemies and heroes and American cinema, in addition to showing us this, manufactures unforgettable characters: the Apache chief, Cochise, and mother courage, Fernanda Hussein. We’ll see”.     

Miriam Martín and Ana Useros

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. 
 

The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines. 

The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.  

Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.  

A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.