Documenta Madrid, International Film Festival organized by the Culture, Tourism and Sports Area of the City Council, returns from May 6 to 11 in its 22nd edition, reaffirming its commitment to cinema as a space for reflection, memory and experimentation. The program -to be held at Cineteca Madrid as the main venue, and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Filmoteca Española, the Escuela de Cinematografía y del Audiovisual de la Comunidad de Madrid (ECAM), La Casa Encendida and Casa de México- proposes a cinematographic journey through diverse realities, bold languages and narratives that defy convention.

Under the artistic direction of Luis E. Parés and the programming committee integrated by Paola Buontempo, Javier H. Estrada, Ruth M. Somalo and Florencia de Múgica, the festival consolidates a curatorial line focused on the promotion of national cinema, archival cinema as a tool of memory and the auteur documentary as an aesthetic and political engine. With a renewed image that invites to think about the city, time and the materiality of cinema, Documenta Madrid 2025 will gather in its competitive sections 36,000 euros in prizes and will open space to new voices and looks, both in its competitions and in its parallel sections.
 

Opening with the hidden legacy of Ricardo Bofill 
The inaugural session will present a cinematographic discovery of international scope: the recovery of two unpublished films by the famous architect Ricardo Bofill, Image of the City and Architectural Hallucination, both from 1967. These films, never shown publicly, reveal Bofill's visionary view of modern urbanism.

They will be accompanied by the premiere of Maldito niño, a collaborative piece made by young people from the Escuela Dentro Cine de Cineteca Madrid, the result of a project with the Universidad Carlos III and Filmoteca Española, which reinterprets images shot in Equatorial Guinea between 1926 and 1930.

Official Competitions and Corte Final: a showcase for documentary diversity
The competitive sections maintain their three categories: the International Competition, the National Competition and the Corte Final section, the latter for Spanish works in advanced stages of editing. Each of these categories awards prizes from both the jury and the audience, in addition to recognizing formal innovation and creative risk through the Fugas award. Corte Final, one of the main pillars of the festival, which is committed to cinema in all its stages, is endowed with a distribution award managed by the Freak Agency and valued at 6,000 euros.

The archive as the center of gravity: five major retrospectives
This year's parallel program focuses on the archive image as a trigger for new memories and as a collective heritage. Five cycles stand out within this line in each of the festival's venues. 

Memory as resistance. The film work of Kamal Aljafari, a retrospective in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, brings together key pieces by the Palestinian filmmaker who explores family and national memory from a radical poetics of the archive. In collaboration with La Casa Encendida, the cycle When USA Dared to Dream shows four recent films that review moments of struggle and cultural transformation in the U.S. At the Reina Sofia Museum, there will be Ute Aurand. People, Places, Life, a 16 mm selection that includes a masterclass to discover the intimate and vital work of this German experimental filmmaker. Also, at Casa de México, you will be able to enjoy A vast country. Contemporary Mexican Documentary Films, a look at current Mexican documentaries with titles such as La libertad fantasma and Tratado de invisibilidad. And in collaboration with ECAM, the festival includes Returning the Gaze, a program created by second year documentary students around the work of British filmmaker Miranda Pennell.

Special sections
Two unique screenings stand out in the special sections of this edition of Documenta Madrid. TWST: Things We Said Today, by filmmaker Andrei Ujică, addresses the arrival of the Beatles in New York as a reflection of a convulsed America. And Vestida de azul (1983), a restored documentary by Antonio Giménez Rico, makes visible the lives of five trans women in Spain during the Transition. Both proposals delve into the power of the archive as a social and political mirror.

Cineteca Constellation
The Cineteca Constellation program reinforces the links between Documenta Madrid and other creative spaces integrated in Matadero Madrid, articulating a series of screenings that dialogue with urban history, memory and contemporary artistic practice. In this framework, Medialab proposes the screening of Viento del este, by artist Maia Gattás, an intimate journey of the director to the West Bank in search of the traces of her missing father. Intermediae presents La memoria es nuestra, a choral chronicle of the Barrio del Pilar as told by its own neighbors. And the Centro de Residencias Artísticas exhibits De matadero a vivero, a piece by Fernando Sánchez Castillo that traces the 100-year history of the center, from its origin as a municipal slaughterhouse to its conversion into a cultural center.

Activities, meetings and training: spaces to think about film
Documenta Madrid 2025 is not only an exhibition festival, but also a meeting place for professionals, students and spectators. The festival will include educational activities such as the ECAM Encounter with filmmaker Miranda Pennell; the master conference Producing documentary film, with Daniela Alatorre, director of IMCINE, on Mexico-Spain co-productions; the speculative sound workshop No debería estar ahí, given by Abel Hernández; the workshop for children on audiovisual creation and archive Be Kind Remind, given by filmmaker Camila de Lucas and film critic Javier Rodríguez; and Documenta Pro, in collaboration with Madrid Film Office, a forum for reflection among professionals in the sector. 

Closing session around the group El Paso
The closing of the festival will rescue a valuable testimony of amateur artistic cinema: the unpublished records of the neurosurgeon and amateur filmmaker Alberto Portera about the artistic group El Paso. The screening will feature live music composed and performed by Abel Hernández Pozuelo and will be preceded by the screening of El rastro (Javier Aguirre, 1966), an unpublished film restored by ECAM.

The festival's image bears the signature of Ricardo Cases
In its 22nd edition, Documenta Madrid continues to explore the relationship between film and the visual arts, inviting a creator to build the festival's visual narrative. This year, photographer Ricardo Cases, a key figure in contemporary photography in Spain, has been the artist chosen to develop the visual identity of the event, bringing his keen observation and his fresh, ironic and critical look at the urban and social environment. 

For this collaboration, Ricardo Cases has documented the periphery of Matadero Madrid, epicenter of contemporary creation and headquarters of Cineteca, organizer of the festival. His focus has been on the Usera district, a territory in transformation that encapsulates many of the tensions of today's city: cultural diversity, gentrification, workers' memory and new urban identities. Through his camera, Cases portrays everyday scenes full of color, rhythm and humor, where the energy of the neighborhood translates into vibrant images that capture its dynamism and evolution. 

An international jury
The jury of this edition gathers an outstanding international representation of filmmakers, curators and professionals of the sector who will contribute their expert view to the different competitive sections.

The National Competition will feature figures such as Dario Oliveira, director of the Portuguese festival Porto/Post/Doc; Frédéric Maire, director of the Cinémathèque Suisse; and Alejandra Trelles, director of the International Film Festival of Uruguay. Participating in the International Competition will be Tania Pardo, director of CA2M and artistic curator; Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică, a reference in archive cinema and protagonist of one of the special screenings of this edition; and Daniel Mann, winner of the last edition of the festival. 

For its part, the Corte Final jury will be composed of Rafael Alberola, filmmaker and screenwriter; María Oliva, distributor and founder of Sideral; and Luisa Espino, head of the Center for Artistic Residencies at Matadero Madrid. A selection of profiles that embody the dialogue between tradition and avant-garde, industry and innovation.

With this new edition, Documenta Madrid reaffirms its vocation as a space for exhibition, thought and creation, where documentary film is understood as a living tool to understand the present, rescue the past and think about possible futures.

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