• Rivisitazione dello sciopero reinterprets recovered footage from Pasolini’s lost documentary on the 1970 sanitation workers’ strike.
• The 23rd edition of Documenta Madrid is structured around the concept of “Taking the Pulse”, a thematic focus that highlights direct cinema as a means of documenting social and cultural reality.
• With 26 films in competition, four projects in the Final Cut section, and a parallel program spread across six venues, the festival consolidates its role as a meeting point for non-fiction cinema.

An unreleased film by Pier Paolo Pasolini opens today the 23rd edition of Documenta Madrid, the City of Madrid’s International Film Festival, organized by the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport from May 26 to 31. The festival is one of Spain’s leading platforms for the exhibition, reflection, and creation of non-fiction cinema.

Rivisitazione dello sciopero is an audiovisual project by Cosimo Terlizzi and Luca Maria Baldini inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary on the Rome sanitation workers’ strike of April 24, 1970. The documentary, long believed lost, was rediscovered in 2005 without its original soundtrack. To mark the centenary of Pasolini’s birth, Terlizzi and Baldini reinterpret the recovered footage through a live sound performance in which voices, samples, synthesizers, and analogue instruments create an immersive sensory experience. The filmmaker’s voice emerges through the faces of the workers, generating a powerful interaction between language and sound, interwoven with excerpts from writer Alberto Moravia’s celebrated funeral speech for Pasolini.

The creators—composer, sound designer, and artist Luca Maria Baldini, and video artist and filmmaker Cosimo Terlizzi—have reduced the original work from 84 to 40 minutes, transforming it into a live audiovisual journey that bridges historical memory and contemporary sensibility. The project was made possible through the collaboration of the Audiovisual Archive of the Italian Workers’ and Democratic Movement (AAMOD).

Documenta Madrid 2026

In its 23rd edition, Documenta Madrid is organized around the concept of “Taking the Pulse”, a thematic focus that reclaims the tradition of direct cinema and its ability to capture social and cultural reality in an immediate way.

Organized by Cineteca Madrid, the festival maintains its three competitive sections—International Competition, National Competition, and Corte Final—with €36,000 in awards, in addition to a distribution prize managed by Agencia Freak. The festival also features a strong parallel program of retrospectives, special screenings, professional gatherings, and workshops. Cineteca Madrid serves as the festival’s main venue, while the parallel program extends across the city through Filmoteca Española, La Casa Encendida, ECAM, and Goethe-Institut, reinforcing its role as a meeting point for filmmakers, industry professionals, and audiences.

The visual identity for this edition was created by photographer Nicolás Combarro, whose proposal focuses on Matadero Madrid as a space of memory and contemporary creation, in dialogue with the festival’s closing film. His exploration of architecture and memory extends, through graphic imagery, some of the key themes running throughout this 23rd edition.

The festival will close with the premiere of Vial Matadero, a previously unseen film by filmmaker Juan Cavestany created specifically for this edition and produced by Matadero Madrid and Cineteca Madrid. The film offers a reflection on Matadero as a symbolic space of urban and social transformation, turning this cultural landmark into a mirror of the city’s ongoing changes.

The closing event will also feature the screening of A mitad del mar, a preview of the next documentary by Escuela Dentro Cine, a project of Cineteca Madrid and Matadero Madrid developed in collaboration with Fundación Banco Sabadell and the ASPA network of Madrid City Council’s Directorate-General for Family and Childhood, with support from Opción 3 and Fundación Balia. Escuela Dentro Cine is led by the association 24 Posibilidades, which works with young people in vulnerable situations.