Moon Projector

The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.   

Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.    

From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom. 

Moon Projector returns in 2026 with the grandmaster of Czech animation, Karel Zeman (Ostroměř, 1910 – Prague, 1989), an iconic film-maker in the history of fantasy cinema. 

The visual world of Karel Zeman encompasses an array of influences, from the imagery of Jules Verne and his provocative vision of the future to the dream-like, romantic aesthetic of illustrator Gustave Doré — palpable in Zeman’s scenes with an Orientalist and exotic flavour — not to mention the creative solutions of Georges Méliès. Zeman’s imagination led him not only to invent but also construct from a craftsman’s resources, and from this world came creations of identity such as the short film Inspiration (1948) and his first feature-length film King Lavra (1950), establishing him as a probing, revolutionary artist. From his first productions with puppets and the use of stop-motion, his style would evolve with the use of animated drawing and his interaction with classical fiction. Works such as The Treasure of Bird Island (1952), Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), The Fabulous Baron (1961), The Stolen Airship (1967) and his final feature film The Tale of John and Mary (1980) combine to make Karel Zeman one of the twentieth century’s most relevant film artists. Such a legacy is discernible in the work of numerous directors — the creatures of Ray Harryhaussen, the puppets of Tadanari Okamoto, childhood as a free space in the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the animated illustrations of Terry Gilliam, the fantasy of Tim Burton and even the offbeat world of Wes Anderson.

In a war, where does hope live? Beyond the Wall… The Beach! envisions a better world through the eyes of children in Palestine. A vision which is explored in this programme via a selection of films — fiction and animation — from this war-torn country. From an adult’s point of view, war is justified on political and moral grounds. Through a child’s eyes, however, any logic of war’s brutality is demolished and their perspective shows the tragedy of war as a mistake without justification. Faced with adult destruction, children reaffirm life in its fullness.     

The line-up of film-makers of Palestinian origin to feature here — Ibrahim Handal, Tariq Rimawi, Firas Khoury, Rami Abbas, Nisreen Yaseen and Haneen Koraz — are a case in point. Ibrahim Handal stands as one of the emerging voices among young Palestinian film-makers, his practice focusing on daily life, identity and resistance with a body of work which, although rooted in reality, plays with creative documentary and fiction. Firas Khoury, meanwhile, is a renowned Palestinian director whose work has come to express what normal life would be like for children in Palestine, showing the reality facing any child. Both film-makers remove the veil of prejudice as they make the life of Palestinian children equal to the life of children in any peaceful country.   

The introduction to the series features Rami Abbas, a Palestinian-born film-maker who studied in Syria and currently lives in Madrid. His work is a further example of diaspora and of memory and resistance. Hide & Seek (2024) reflects this side of exodus and, in relation to this experience, protection of the most vulnerable.  

Nisreen Yaseen, for her part, imparts a vision of the transition from childhood to adolescence, in which the noise of war is dissolved, while Tariq Rimawi’s award-winning animated short film Zoo (2022) is an aesthetic work of profound symbolic importance which expounds the opposition between oppression and freedom. 

Finally, Haneen Koraz, who has made her entire body of work from refugee camps on the Gaza Strip, giving voice, through animation workshops, to minors, mothers and families. A Day in the Tent (2024) is a filmic show of resilience and truth that allows the Gaza people to tell the world what it means to live under bombs. Only through a child’s eye, and drawings, can this reality without prejudice be shown. 

Moon Projector is the Museo Reina Sofía’s regular film programme for young audiences. Every Sunday morning, sessions are held to introduce children to cinema and audiovisual arts, taking them on a journey of fascination, where imagination and knowledge abound, from the dawn of film language to today’s most creative and original works with future generations in mind. The programme title draws from the work of poet Federico García Lorca, a Moon Projector where dreams and early imagination reverberate, and where children’s fantasy emerges from the contemplation of projected light.

Dancing Forms takes us into the genesis of animation, into the fascinating worlds of early footage of moving forms and colour in film. These principles denoted the first filmic experience of animated cinema, in this case through the basic forms of art that inspired experimental creation, as well as an approach to primitive imagery. This visual and sound experience seeks to explore the sensory world of child contemplation — a journey of forms, colours, sound and different music which spark children’s curious gaze. A new world without identity figures or predictable narratives, where the youngest children can directly experience moving forms and colours.

The artists and film-makers who accompany us on this voyage include some of the pioneers from the historical avant-garde and key artists in the mid-twentieth century. The session is structured around Oskar Fischinger (Germany,1900 – USA,1967), one of the grand masters of animation by way of the experimental montage of sounds and images; Len Lye (New Zealand, 1901 – USA, 1980), a reference point in experimental animation in the first half of the twentieth century via the innovative fusion of sounds, such as Latin rhythms, mambo and swing, and abstract forms; Mary Ellen Bute (USA,1906–1983), one of the first women experimental film-makers with a work which pivots around synaesthesia, music turned into images; Norman McLaren (Scotland, 1914 – Canada, 1987), undoubtedly one of the most relevant artists in the creation of graphic-sound animations; and finally Faith Hubley (New York, 1924–2001), an artist behind evocative abstract films that evolved from primitive forms to narrative figuration.

Moon Projector is the Museo Reina Sofía’s regular film programme for young audiences. Every Sunday morning, sessions are held to introduce children to cinema and audiovisual arts, taking them on a journey of fascination, where imagination and knowledge abound, from the dawn of film language to today’s most creative and original works with future generations in mind. The programme title draws from the work of poet Federico García Lorca, a Moon Projector where dreams and early imagination reverberate, and where children’s fantasy emerges from the contemplation of projected light.   

Following a showing of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest feature-length animation film preserved, this edition of Moon Projector shows some of the animated short films Lotte Reiniger made with inspiration from European tradition: the Brothers Grimm’s Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s The Three Wishes. Under the wing of the German film-maker, this children’s literary heritage, which germinated in Romanticism, takes on a new aesthetic and artistic meaning, her unique style of frame-by-frame silhouettes evolving in this ensemble of past animations with an original stage design and a new narrative rhythm from entertaining artistic expressions and musical pieces.    

Lotte Reiniger (Germany, 1899–1981) is regarded as the pioneer of animation film. Inspired by the films of Georges Méliès, German Expressionism and pre-cinema inventions, Reiniger conceived of her own universe based on storytelling tradition, the genesis of narrative animation.    

Pivotally, one aspect of the film-maker’s work was the prolific creation of animation films based on European cultural heritage, where she gathered the tales of the continent’s great fable storytellers. The majority of these animated black-and-white pieces were made for the BBC in the UK, where Reiniger lived from 1949 onwards after fleeing the spread of Nazism in Germany and following spells in different European countries.

Moon Projector is the Museo Reina Sofía’s regular film programme for young audiences. Every Sunday morning, sessions are held to introduce children to cinema and audiovisual arts, taking them on a journey of fascination, where imagination and knowledge abound, from the dawn of film language to today’s most creative and original works with future generations in mind. The programme title draws from the work of poet Federico García Lorca, a Moon Projector where dreams and early imagination reverberate, and where children’s fantasy emerges from the contemplation of projected light.   

Colours! is the second part of these children’s sessions, screening, under a conceptual chromatic arc, short animation and documentary films for all ages. This session shines a light on film-makers from a range of time periods, for instance Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami; more contemporary figures like French artist and film-maker Alain Biet; young animation directors such as German artist Franka Sachse, Lithuanian director Ignas Meilunas, and Swiss illustrator and animator Oona Lacroix. Congregated here, they form an all-encompassing, colour-based experience from knowledge, plays with light, graphic stories, illustration and humour.   

Rangha (The Colours) is a short film Kiarostami made for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults — known as Kanoon, and highly active in the 1960s and 1970s in Iran — which explores the theme of colour from an educational vision and its manifestation in the everyday of childhood. A knowledge-based aesthetic representation with echoes of daily life. Alain Biet’s Grands Canons (Perfect Copies) is a symphony of paper illustrations of daily objects which come to life with plays of colour. In Saka sy Vorona (Cat and Bird), Franka Sachse seems to make colours disappear, despite only using one: on a white background the silhouette of a black cat appears that seems to reveal a small white bird emerging from the darkness, an encounter that creates a play of possible forms and silhouettes. In Mr. Night Has a Day Off, Mister Night is in charge day becoming night, but one fine day he decides to visit the city in the morning, much to his dismay. Drawing from a simple idea and a fun character, animator Ignas Meilunas reveals the secret of colours to us: light. Finally, in Coucouleurs Oona Lacroix recounts the lives of different birds that nest in trees sharing their same colour. But what happens when a bird has more than one colour?

Moon Projector is the Museo Reina Sofía’s regular film programme for young audiences. Every Sunday morning, sessions are held to introduce children to cinema and audiovisual arts, taking them on a journey of fascination, where imagination and knowledge abound, from the dawn of film language to today’s most creative and original works with future generations in mind. The programme title draws from the work of poet Federico García Lorca, a Moon Projector where dreams and early imagination reverberate, and where children’s fantasy emerges from the contemplation of projected light.   

This inaugural session takes us back to the beginning. The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the first ever feature-length animation film, made using the silhouette animation technique and shadow puppetry, and tells a story from One Thousand and One Nights. Achmed, his father the Caliph, his sister Dinarsade and an evil sorcerer are the characters in this first great story. The young prince objects to his sister being handed over to a treacherous sorcerer who has put a price on a magic flying horse. In his eagerness, the prince is deceived by the wizard, who makes him mount the horse, taking him to an unknown and faraway place. The film reveals, for the first time, colour and forms in a fantastical story — an aesthetic explosion with the capacity for unique and dreamy fascination.      

Lotte Reiniger (Germany, 1899–1981) is regarded as the pioneer of animation film. Inspired by the films of Georges Méliès, German Expressionism and pre-cinema inventions, Reiniger conceived of her own universe based on storytelling tradition, the genesis of narrative animation. Drawing from popular children’s puppetry theatre and shadow play, she built animated stories with silhouettes and shadows which would later evolve into experimentation with colour.    

This screening unveils the Museo’s new cinema theatre, a renovated cinematic space, after a year of remodelling work, which holds a set Thursday-to-Sunday programme with an array of audiences and gazes in mind.

Economy of Hate features one sole work, Oído Odio (2021) by artist Diego del Pozo Barriuso. The piece combines television and media archive materials, recordings with performers with explicitly queer corporalities and 3D animations, combining in a strikingly fluid dialogue. The title alludes to a notion developed by the artist concerning the materiality with which hate circulates and the way it escalates. Setting out from the idea that hate is an affect which gains more value the more it circulates, the video shows the evolution from television to mobiles, expounding how the change of technological paradigm has made viral the fact of being in contact more than ever with explicitly violent images.

Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.

A session which starts from a subtle corporeal challenge that prompts a confrontation with reason from sensibility and emotion, both of which are linked to a difference in mental health or spiritualism. It opens with a beautiful and strange short film entitled A família do Capitao Gervásio (2013), by Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, set in a small town in inland Brazil, where around half the inhabitants are psychic mediums whose work centres on community healing. The second piece, Dias & Riedweg’s Casulo, is the outcome of a participatory project with a group of patients from the Institute of Psychiatry at the Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro. The video bears witness to the development of their routines after hospitalisation and captures their ideas and impressions about different aspects of life, revealing the division between territories of reason and madness in their daily existence.  

Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s.

This session advances a programme focused on the most elemental side of performance: a simple, direct act that starts from the self-exhibition of the body. At certain points, from the calculated serenity of Miguel Benlloch’s Tengo tiempo (I Have Time, 1994); at other times, from the challenging and visceral impulse of Bollos (Buns, 1996), by Cabello y Carceller, or the rage of Habla (Talk, 2008), by Cristina Lucas; and, finally, from video-graphic experimentation, disconcerting and sustained in the dance culture of Moving Backwards (2019), by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, whose mise en scène reminds us that it is not actually déjà vu but the present, unfortunately, that moves through a reactionary period. 

Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s. The session recovers paradigmatic performances, from three successive decades, crossed by the indisputable expression of gender; that is, mediated by the confronted acts of feminisms and the queer paradigms of culture.

 

Nuestra tierra (Our Land, 2025) is Argentinian film-maker Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary and her most recent work. The film focuses on the legal case surrounding the murder, in 2009, of Javier Chocobar, a member of the Los Chuschagasta Indigenous community, who was killed while  resisting  the forced displacement of  ancestral land located in northern Argentina, territory  hiscommunity has inhabited and farmed for centuries. 

Drawning on fragments of the above-mentioned trial, which took place in 2019, as well as a meticulous reconstruction of the history of Los Chuschagasta since the seventeenth century, Martel decries how colonial violence, far from being a relic of the past, underlies current political and social structures and ends in the mistreatment and systematic invisibility of Indigenous peoples.   

Lucrecia Martel is a director and screenwriter widely regarded asone of the most relevant film-makers in the twenty-first-centuryLatin American cinema. To date, she has directed four feature-length films: La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), Zama (2001), La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) and La mujer rubia (The Blonde Woman, 2008), all of which have been awarded at film festivals, including recognitions  in the Official Selection at Cannes.  Accross her work Martel explores the complexities of an Argentina shaped by the political and social crisis of the 1990s and by the burden of a colonial past, which she translates into her own visual language of documentary, paradoxically offsetting it against fiction. As Martel asserts: “What I do is all lies, all artifice. I don’t believe in the truth and, if there is any effect of truth in my films, then it’s a miracle”. 

These notions, the germinating material of her films, enable a reflection on how the tactics of fiction and imagination, materialized thought creativity, can function as powerful means  of resisting the erasure of memory and as a tactic of reparative justice. This line of thought also underpins READ Madrid. The Festival of Books and Ideas, which frames the screening of this film.  

READ Madrid is a space of encounter for critical and experimental voices in the sphere of literature and theory. The festival gathers a transatlantic framework of voices related to writing, art and publishing, whose practices challenge hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production and make room for performative and cinematic forms as expanded forms of research. 

READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas emerges as a meeting space for critical and experimental voices in the fields of literature, theory, and publishing. With particular attention to artistic production practices and independent publishing, and seeking to build a transatlantic cultural bridge with Latin America, the program aims to decenter hegemonic frameworks of knowledge production and open up new communities of interpretation and horizons for political imagination. To this end, it takes writing and reading—understood in broad and plural ways across their modes, forms, and registers—as constitutive of a public laboratory of what we call study: a space for thinking collectively, debating and coining ideas, making and unmaking arguments, as well as articulating new imaginaries and forms of enunciation.

In a context of ecological, political, and epistemological crisis, the festival proposes modes of gathering that make it possible to sustain shared time and space for collective reflection, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the terms of cultural debate. In this sense, the program is conceived as an intervention into the contemporary conditions of circulation and legitimation of thought and creation, expanding the traditional boundaries of the book and connecting literature, visual arts, performance, and critical thought. These formats are organized around three thematic axes led by key voices in contemporary writing, artistic practice, and critical thinking.

The thematic axes of READ Madrid. Festival of Books and Ideas are: a popular minoritarian, or how to activate an emancipatory practice of the popular; raging peace, or how to sustain justice, mourning, and repair without resorting to pacifying imaginaries devoid of conflict; and fiction against oblivion, which explores the role of science fiction, horror, and speculative narratives as forms of resistance against the liberalism of forgetting. Ultimately, the aim is to interrogate our present through the potential that ideas and books can mobilize within a shared space of study, debate, and enjoyment.