Documenta Madrid 2026 Festival kicks off with an unreleased film by Pier Paolo Pasolini

• Rivisitazione dello sciopero reinterprets recovered footage from Pasolini’s lost documentary on the 1970 sanitation workers' strike.
• The 23rd edition of Documenta Madrid is structured around the concept of 'Taking the Pulse,' an axis that champions direct cinema as a way to record social and cultural reality.
• With 26 films in competition, four projects in the 'Corte Final' section, and parallel programming across six venues, the festival consolidates its role as a meeting point for non-fiction cinema.

An unreleased film by Pier Paolo Pasolini opens the 23rd edition of Documenta Madrid today. The International Film Festival of the Madrid City Council, organized by the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport, runs from May 26 to 31 and stands as one of the premier spaces for the exhibition, reflection, and creation of non-fiction cinema in Spain.

Rivisitazione dello sciopero is an audiovisual project by Cosimo Terlizzi and Luca Maria Baldini, inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's documentary on the Rome sanitation workers' strike of April 24, 1970. The documentary, which was considered lost for years, was found in 2005 without sound. To mark the centenary of Pasolini’s birth, Terlizzi and Baldini reinterpret the original footage in this work through a live sound performance where voices, samples, synthesizers, and analog instruments shape an immersive perceptual experience. The filmmaker's voice emerges through the faces of the workers, creating a powerful interaction between language and sound, interwoven with fragments of writer Alberto Moravia’s celebrated eulogy at Pasolini's funeral.

The authors—composer, sound designer, and artist Luca Maria Baldini, and video artist and filmmaker Cosimo Terlizzi—have reduced the duration of the original work from 84 to 40 minutes, turning it into a live audiovisual journey that bridges historical memory and contemporary sensibility. This work was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Audiovisual Archive of the Italian Workers' and Democratic Movement (AAMOD).

Documenta Madrid 2026

In its 23rd edition, Documenta Madrid is structured around the concept of 'Taking the Pulse,' a thematic axis that champions the tradition of direct cinema and its capacity to immediately record social and cultural reality.

Organized by Cineteca Madrid, the festival maintains its three competitive sections—International, National, and Corte Final—with €36,000 in prizes, in addition to the distribution award managed by Agencia Freak, as well as a robust parallel program featuring retrospectives, special sessions, professional meetings, and workshops. The main venue will be Cineteca Madrid, with parallel programming taking place at various city locations such as Filmoteca Española, La Casa Encendida, ECAM, and the Goethe-Institut, consolidating its role as a meeting point for filmmakers, professionals, and the public.

The visual identity for this edition was created by photographer Nicolás Combarro, whose proposal focuses on Matadero Madrid as a space for memory and contemporary creation, in dialogue with the closing film. His perspective on architecture and memory extends, through graphic imagery, some of the themes that run throughout this 23rd edition of the festival.

The festival’s closing ceremony will feature the premiere of Vial Matadero, an unreleased film by filmmaker Juan Cavestany made specifically for this edition and produced by Matadero Madrid and Cineteca Madrid. The film proposes a look at Matadero as a symbolic space of urban and social transformation, turning this cultural enclave into a mirror of the city’s changes.

Additionally, the festival’s closing will feature the screening of A mitad del mar, a preview of the upcoming documentary from the 'Escuela Dentro Cine' (Inside Cinema School), a project by Cineteca Madrid and Matadero Madrid, in collaboration with the Banco Sabadell Foundation and the ASPA network of the General Directorate for Family and Children of the Madrid City Council, with the support of Opción 3 and the Balia Foundation. 'Escuela Dentro Cine' is directed by the association 24 posibilidades, which works with young people in vulnerable situations.

More information: documentamadrid.com