FILM SERIES 'MADRID IS LANDSCAPE'

Cineteca joins the Madrid City Council's Madrid is Landscape initiative, an annual programme of activities surrounding International Landscape Day (October 20) that seeks to decentralize the perspective on landscape, highlighting not only the most emblematic spaces, but also the city's everyday landscapes and how public art inhabits them. In collaboration with the Sub-Directorate of Urban Landscape and Public Art, we are organizing three consecutive sessions accompanied by discussions that explore the relationship between public space and civic experience. We open with a double bill portraying two contrasting urban realities: Mitología de barrio (2024), by the Madrid-based collective Espírituescalera, journeys through the most inhabited yet most invisible Madrid through the story of a man dozing in his grocery store on the periphery; it is followed by Quién vio los templos caer (Lucía Selva, 2025), a sensitive look at identity and rootlessness in the city of Granada. Following the screening, the filmmakers will reflect on cinema and the urban space of the Madrid and Granada peripheries. The second session takes us to the streets of Paris with Chats perchés (Chris Marker, 2004), which follows a filmmaker unravelling the mystery of smiling cats drawn on walls, a vibrant popular fresco of post-9/11 France; architects Aritz González and David García-Asenjo will translate the film's images to the Madrid context to discuss urban art and urbanism. We close with a meeting featuring the Madrid-based artist collective Boa Mistura, who will accompany the screening of Crossroads. El viaje circular de Boa Mistura (2023), a documentary about their journey through communities worldwide championing art as a tool for social change.