Streets, homes and rooms: Cineteca Madrid explores the spaces of contemporary life through cinema in January

• The programme includes urban symphonies, contemporary noir and domestic horror to reflect on space through images
• In parallel, Cineteca Madrid presents a retrospective dedicated to filmmaker Heinz Emigholz and his singular on architecture
• The Ciudades Reveladas collective explores ways of dwelling through Latin American cinema with a curated carte blanche of screenings
• In addition, Cineteca Madrid offers this month a special focus on filmmaker Juan Cavestany and his intimate, expanded portrait of the city of Madrid
• The programme is completed by a retrospective cycle dedicated to pioneer Germaine Dulac, a key figure of the cinematic avant-garde
• Family screenings and experimental cinema sessions will also be featured, alongside new editions of CineZeta and La Noche Z

Cineteca Madrid, a venue of the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport, presents in January a cinematic journey through the spaces that shape our everyday lives, from the urban scale to the intimacy of a room. Under the title Machines for Living, the programme invites audiences to reflect on how cinema has constructed, interpreted and questioned the places we inhabit, revealing their political, emotional and symbolic dimensions. Through urban symphonies, neighbourhood stories, architectures of fear, film essays and experimental perspectives, the programme articulates a critical geography of contemporary dwelling, where city, home and body intertwine as sites of conflict, memory and desire.

Machines for Living cycle

What relationship does cinema have with the spaces we inhabit? How have images contributed to shaping our experience of the city, the home or intimacy? Machines for Living raises these questions as the backbone of January’s programme. Structured in four chapters—the city, the neighbourhood, the home and the room—the cycle traces a cinematic cartography that moves from the collective to the intimate, exploring how spaces are not only inhabited by us, but also inhabit us in return.

Chapter 1: The City: Urban Symphonies

This first chapter revisits the tradition of urban symphonies, a genre born out of the avant-gardes of the 1920s that sought to capture the pulse, energy and complexity of metropolitan life.

Among the most emblematic works in the programme is Manhatta (USA, 1921), by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, considered one of the earliest urban symphonies in cinema and a poetic portrait of New York as an expanding modern machine.

Alongside it, Rien que les heures (France, 1926), by Alberto Cavalcanti, offers a fragmented and melancholic view of interwar Paris. The journey culminates with Koyaanisqatsi (USA, 1982), by Godfrey Reggio, a powerful audiovisual composition that transforms the contemporary city into a hypnotic flow of images and sounds.

Chapter 2: The Neighbourhood: Mean Streets

The neighbourhood has been one of the great settings of modern cinema, a space where everyday life coexists with violence, desire and conflict. This programme brings together highly diverse perspectives that turn the neighbourhood into a mythical, political or emotional territory.

Among the most representative films of the cycle is La Haine (France, 1995), by Mathieu Kassovitz, an electric and still relevant portrait of structural violence and frustration on the urban periphery. Neighbouring Sounds (Brazil, 2012), by Kleber Mendonça Filho, shifts conflict to a more subterranean scale, where urban planning, memory and fear seep into the daily life of an apparently peaceful Brazilian neighbourhood. Completing this map is Chungking Express (Hong Kong, 1994), by Wong Kar-wai, which transforms streets, corridors and night-time venues in Hong Kong into a vibrant emotional space.

Chapter 3: The Home: Living with Terror

Curated by Alberto Sedano, this programme approaches the home as one of the most unsettling spaces in the contemporary imagination. Among the most telling titles is The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, USA, 1979), in which the house ceases to be a refuge and becomes a financial and emotional trap.

Candyman (USA, 1992), by Bernard Rose, shifts horror towards urbanism and segregation, turning housing into a space marked by structural violence and repressed memory. Films by Ti West—The House of the Devil (USA, 2009) and The Innkeepers (USA, 2011), the latter screened in a special La Noche Zeta session—update the haunted house motif through a recognisable precariousness, where economic necessity pushes characters to inhabit spaces that already signal their threat. The cycle closes with the revival of That House on the Outskirts (Aquella casa en las afueras, Spain, 1980), by Eugenio Martín, a rare work of Spanish cinema that turns the domestic space into the trigger of a collective trauma.

Chapter 4: The Room: A World Within Four Walls

The final chapter of the cycle brings together avant-garde works set in rooms, hotel rooms or minimal interior spaces, where the everyday acquires radical sensory density. In Room Film 73 (UK, 1973), Peter Gidal reduces the room to a field of extreme perception, forcing the viewer to inhabit time and duration as a physical experience.

Hotel Diaries (UK, 2001–2007), by John Smith, transforms hotel rooms into involuntary observatories of the everyday—impersonal spaces that, filmed over years and across cities, accumulate memory, humour and strangeness. Meanwhile, Berlin 10/90 (France, 1990), by Robert Kramer, confines the filmmaker to a single room for an hour, turning it into a stage for thought, drift and political confession.

Heinz Emigholz retrospective: essays on architecture

This cycle offers a singular encounter between cinema and architecture, far removed from any explanatory or didactic intent. Through films such as Dieste [Uruguay] (Germany, 2017), Perret in France and Algeria (Germany, 2012) and Parabeton – Pier Luigi Nervi and Roman Concrete (Germany, 2012), Emigholz films buildings as living bodies, attending to their materiality, their relationship with the environment and the passage of time. Rather than illustrating theories, these films turn architecture into a perceptual and sensory experience, where space unfolds as a form of thought in itself.

Ciudades Reveladas collective

In collaboration with Intermediae, Cineteca Madrid offers a carte blanche to the Ciudades Reveladas collective, curated by Khalil Esteban. The programme brings together films from independent Latin American cinema that reflect on dwelling from different scales and contexts, with particular attention to residential buildings as social infrastructure. Through stories set in Brazil, Chile or Argentina, the cycle raises questions about communal life, the housing crisis, the pandemic and ways of documenting everyday life through cinema. Highlights include Diz a Ela que me Viu Chorar (Brazil, 2019) and Era o Hotel Cambridge (Brazil–France, 2015).

Special focus on Juan Cavestany

On the occasion of the premiere of Madrid, Ext. (Spain, 2025), Cineteca Madrid dedicates a special focus to Juan Cavestany, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Spanish cinema. The programme brings together works that explore the city through intimacy, humour and radical observation of everyday life.

From his early minimal pieces to his portraits of Madrid during and after lockdown, the selection traces a journey through the city’s scales—from the individual to the urban network—and proposes a free, deeply personal way of filming space. Notable titles include El señor (Spain, 2012) and Madrid, Int. (Spain, 2020), which will be screened in a cinema for the first time ever. All sessions will be presented by the Madrid-based director.

Germaine Dulac retrospective: What Is Cinema?

A key figure of the French avant-garde and a pioneer of cinema as an autonomous art form, Germaine Dulac is the subject of a wide-ranging retrospective that explores the many facets of her work. Beyond her association with surrealism, the programme highlights her cinematic thinking, political commitment and formal experimentation. Screenings include avant-garde pieces, works linked to Spanish culture, musical experiments and some of the earliest video essays in film history, offering a complex and essential portrait of a foundational filmmaker.

Notable screenings include The Smiling Madame Beudet (France, 1923) and The Seashell and the Clergyman (France, 1928). This cycle runs in parallel with the exhibition Germaine Dulac. Je n’ai plus rien at the Museu Tàpies in Barcelona, curated by Imma Merino and Imma Prieto, the museum’s director, who will present one of the sessions in the retrospective.

CineZeta: Dead Time

On Saturdays 17 and 31 January, the young programming team of CineZeta proposes a space for rest, play and collective reflection on cinema. Under the title Dead Time, these sessions bring together films that question the use of time and ways of making cinema, exploring leisure, pause and the reappropriation of images. A cinema rooted in proximity, archives and community, advocating alternative ways of seeing and sharing.

Cineteca for families: imagined cities

January’s family programme invites audiences to journey through animated cities full of enigmas and adventures. From Monsters, Inc. (USA, 2001) to Metropolis by Osamu Tezuka (Japan, 2001), and A Cat in Paris (France–Belgium, 2010), the cycle offers different ways of imagining and inhabiting the city: from the monsters’ industrial metropolis to futuristic labyrinths and nocturnal streets seen from the rooftops.

January’s programme is completed by recent premieres in Spanish cinema such as The Law of Sodom (Spain, 2025), Os espazos en branco (Spain, 2023), Del susurro del tiempo (Spain, 2025) and Before (Spain, 2020). New sessions of Cineteca’s regular cycles—Relatos del ruido, Confesionario, DOCMA Cycle and Foro CIMA—will also take place, alongside a new instalment of TVE Essentials featuring the film Los Chichos: ni más ni menos (Paco Millán, Spain, 2025).