MADRID.- Cineteca Madrid is opening its new season by looking beyond the traditional boundaries of cinema, bringing dance, music, digital art and expanded moving-image practices into the screening room throughout September.
At the center of the month-long program is a tribute to French-Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet, whose work has increasingly moved between contemporary dance, film, music videos and the visual arts. Running from September 5 to 11 in collaboration with Centro Danza Matadero, the series brings together some of the films and projects that have helped make Jalet one of the most recognizable choreographic voices working across disciplines today.
The program begins September 5 with Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), a reimagining of the cult horror film in which dance functions as both ritual and hidden language. The following day, audiences can see Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Prez (2024), for which Jalet created choreography, alongside Gilles Delmas’s less widely seen The Ferryman (2016), a collaboration involving artists including Marina Abramović and the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
On September 11, Cineteca will screen Jonas kerlund’s DuEls (2024), filmed at Oslo’s Vigeland Museum, where choreography by Jalet and Erna marsdttir unfolds among Gustav Vigeland’s sculptures. A selection of Jalet’s short films and music videos will also be presented that day in his presence. He will remain in Madrid for a public conversation with filmmaker Carlos Marqus-Marcet on September 12.
Jalet’s recent visibility has stretched far beyond the contemporary dance world. Along with his work on Emilia Prez, he has served as a creative adviser and choreographer for Madonna and created choreography for music projects including Yung Lean’s STORM. The Madrid series offers audiences a chance to see how that physical vocabulary changes as it moves from the stage to feature films, museum spaces and short-form video.
September’s program also pushes further into digital territory through the eighth L.E.V. Matadero festival, taking place from September 17 to 20. Cineteca will host Riccardo Giovinetto’s H U M Ī, an audiovisual installation built from satellite imagery and soundscapes generated in real time. The work approaches borders not as fixed lines but as shifting, unstable spaces shaped by changing geographies and technologies.
Elsewhere, the season opens with a strong slate of premieres and previews. Gabriel Azorn’s debut feature Anoche conquist Tebas will screen from September 4 to 6 following its appearance at Venice’s Giornate degli Autori, where it received Bisato d’Oro honors for screenplay and cinematography.
Alejandro Castro’s Harakiri, me haces falta, winner of the Best Debut Feature award at the Oldenburg Film Festival, arrives later in the month with what Cineteca describes as a visceral portrait of fractured masculinity.
Music and memory intersect in Manuel Bellido and Sigfrid Monlon’s documentary Back in Time!, which revisits the eruption of music, nightlife and personal freedom in Torremolinos during the 1960s and 1970s. Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas’s La noche est marchndose ya, meanwhile, approaches cinema itself as a fragile communal refuge. The Argentine film previously received the Special Jury Prize at Seminci and a directing award at Doclisboa.
One of September’s most ambitious screenings will be the exclusive presentation of the uncut, 330-minute version of Pedro Pinho’s La risa y la navaja. Showing from September 24 to 27, the sprawling film examines neocolonialism, identity and European guilt. Cineteca will place it in dialogue with Pinho and Lusa Homem’s 2008 documentary As cidades e as trocas, which will be screened on September 22. Both works share an engagement with Cape Verde and the complicated historical ties between Europe and Africa.
Questions of memory also run through Permanence of the Ephemeral, a series organized with Festival Punto de Vista, Filmoteca de Valencia and Filmoteca de Galicia. Running September 23–27, the program focuses on artists and filmmakers who gather fragments circulating through social media and transform them into more enduring forms of collective memory. Amateur images that might otherwise disappear into an endless feed become source material for works about identity, connection and the visual record of contemporary life.
Cineteca will also continue its role as a gathering place for Madrid’s festival community. Directed by Women Spain returns for its 12th edition from September 8 to 13, followed by the 35th Madrid Film Festival-PNR from September 15 to 20.
Younger audiences, meanwhile, are being invited to experience cinema as something considerably more physical than a glowing screen. The Cineteca en familia program, developed with filmmakers and educators Deneb Martos and Pablo Useros, combines 16mm, Super 8 and digital projection. Children will be able to handle celluloid, approach projectors and experiment with light and moving images.
That interest in the material life of cinema continues with Historia Natural de Plinio by Pablo Egua. Presented by the ninth generation of Cineteca Madrid’s young programmers, the expanded-cinema performance brings together six Super 8 films shot in New York between 2024 and 2025. Rather than hiding the machinery of projection, the work places the analog projector at the center of the performance, treating it almost like a musical instrument.
Taken together, September’s program suggests a season less interested in defining what cinema is than in asking what else the moving image can become. From Jalet’s choreography and Guadagnino’s Suspiria to satellite data, Super 8 projectors and fragments rescued from social media, Cineteca Madrid is opening its doors to images that move not only across screens, but between artistic disciplines.
