Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid are organising a retrospective of films made by Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) between 1976 and 1986. A cult author, nightclub owner, music producer, professional gambler, publisher and speculator in the contemporary immaterial economy, García-Pelayo concentrates multiple lives into one. All these facets are summarised in a personal interpretation of cinema, understood as a form of existence based on vitality, limitless desire, happenings as a narrative strategy and on insubordination to all that is predictable, whether on a formal or political level. 

The title of the retrospective, Dejen de prohibir que no alcanzo a desobedecer todo, is also the title of the first of a series of eleven films that García-Pelayo has made in the course of 12 months (the year of the eleven films, in the author's words), between 2021 and 2022, in an unparalleled tour-de-force that demonstrates that cinema is a way of life, before an industry or a profession. These eleven films, with their making-ofs, will be screened in September 2022. In turn, this title is the motto that most accurately defines García-Pelayo's entire body of work and best explains the fascination that the author has aroused among a young generation of filmmakers, artists and programmers, who have recovered his work both as the foundation of an unorthodox genealogy of Spanish cinema since the 1970s, as well as a model of confrontation in the face of an anaesthetised society. 

In this cycle, García-Pelayo's historical films are set in the changing and tumultuous society of the Spain of the “Transition”, specifically in the years from 1975 to 1986, between the death of Francisco Franco and the country's entry into the European Economic Community. A time in which the remnants of political authoritarianism and moral conservatism of the dictatorship mingle with the strength of a thriving counterculture and the utopian longing of young people to build a new society, factors that are present in García-Pelayo's films. With this framework in mind, the retrospective dispenses with the traditional historicist or revisionist orientation and places the filmmaker in a contemporary dialogue, in themed sessions with young artists and filmmakers with whom his major topics resonate. Namely: sex as free territory, the social misfits and outcasts as insightful and honest anti-heroes, the radical coexistence between the elevated and the popular, and music, be it flamenco, psychedelia or Sevillanas, as an irruption of the real in fiction. Together with all of this, the same spirit, that of transgressing the forms and limits of a well-meaning society, whether in 1975 or in 2022.

Information of the film series at Museo Reina Sofia