MILAN.- Sueño Perro: Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu, a global multisensory exhibition created by Academy Award-winning film director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, opens to the public tomorrow, 18 September 2025, at Fondazione Prada in Milan. The project, unveiled for the first time on the 25th anniversary of Amores Perros (2000), will be on view until 26 February 2026, and will be subsequently presented in prominent international institutions, including LagoAlgo in Mexico City, from 5 October 2025 to 4 January 2026, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in spring 2026.
On the occasion of the exhibition, Fondazione Pradas Cinema Godard program dedicates the section #Soggettiva to the filmography of Alejandro G. Iñárritu. On Friday 19 September at 6.30 pm, the director will lead a masterclass moderated by Paolo Moretti and will introduce the screening of Amores Perros (2000). The September program also includes 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), and The Revenant (2015).
Sueño Perro marks Fondazione Pradas third collaboration with Iñárritu, who conceived the film program Flesh, Mind and Spirit in Seoul (2009) and Milan (2016), and the experimental VR installation CARNE y ARENA in Milan (2017), which was part of the official selection of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and awarded a special Oscar by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
As stated by Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada, With this project, we aim to open new perspectives on Iñárritus work and on a film that, from its very start, combined the force of realism with the density of symbolism. Twenty-five years after it was released, Amores Perros continues to speak to the present and to capture, with visual and emotional power, the full complexity of the world we live in.
Sueño Perro brings to light never-before-seen footage which speaks to Amores Perros enduring themes of love, betrayal, and violence. These gritty vignettes, once abandoned on the cutting room floor and conserved for a quarter of a century in the film archives at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), capture the charged and interconnected sociopolitical realities of Mexico City, still relevant decades later. Drawing on the raw power and visual poetry of these forgotten images, Iñárritu reimagines their impact through a mosaic of celluloid and sound. At the heart of the installation is a deep reverence for the materiality of 35mm film, whose physical grain, flicker, and warmth evoke a deep sense of nostalgia.
As explained by Iñárritu, Over a million feet of film were left on the cutting room floor during the editing of Amores Perros. These intensely charged images, sixteen million still frames, were buried in the UNAM film archives for 25 years. On the occasion of the films anniversary, I felt compelled to revisit and re-explore these abandoned fragments, with the grain and the ghosts of celluloid which they hold. Stripped of all narrative, this installation is not a tribute, but a resurrection an invitation to feel what never was. Like meeting an old friend we have never seen before.
Audiences walk into a dimly lit labyrinth illuminated by 35mm analog projectors, casting a continuous stream of newly juxtaposed fragments from Amores Perros. A soundscape produced specially for the installation reverberates throughout, permeating the atmosphere like a dream. Slates, celluloid scratches, and light flares between reels interrupt the flow, reminding visitors of the mediums raw physicality. In an age of artificial intelligence and digital oversaturation, Iñárritu invites viewers to step into a man-made, tactile and analog landscape of memory, where the past flickers just out of reach.
Iñárritus installation is on view on the ground floor of the Podium, the main exhibition space of the Milan venue of Fondazione Prada. As part of Sueño Perro, a visual and sound display is conceived by the Mexican writer and journalist Juan Villoro for the first floor of the building. Titled Mexico 2000: The Moment That Exploded, it offers a second layer of narrative from a different perspective. An audio content, along with a vast array of press clippings and documentary photographs by Paolo Gasparini, Graciela Iturbide, Enrique Metinides, and Pedro Meyer, among others, selected by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, immerse the audience in the cultural, social, and political contexts of chaotic and intense Mexico City at the beginning of the new Millennium.
A special edition of the book Amores Perros, co-published by MACK and Fondazione Prada, offers a rich insight into the visual language of this film and the unique creative process of its author comprising backstage images, film stills and storyboards. It features a foreword by Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada, a text by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and contributions by renowned directors Walter Salles and Denis Villeneuve, award-winning novelists Wendy Guerra and Jorge Volpi, film critic Elvis Mitchell, and the films storyboard artist Fernando Llanos.