The Reina Sofía Museum dedicates a cycle to Central American political cinema in the 1970s and 1980s

The Reina Sofía Museum Foundation organized together with the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC), dedicates a cycle to political cinema titled ‘Reframing banana images’ in the 1970s and 1980s, with films by María José Álvarez, Patricia Howell, Ramiro Lacayo-Deshon, Paul Leduc, Kitico Moreno, Ingo Niehaus and Taller de los Vagos.

The cycle, the second of the series co-organized within the ICAC framework and curated by Alonso Aguilar, is articulated in three programs that address everything from territorial bases and peasant stories to the taking of arms and the insurgent decline. The series will be scheduled from June 18 to 27 at the Sabatini Building Cinema.

The first program explains the bases of agrarian exploitation and the forms of resistance that arise in the rural world. The second program deals with topics such as patriarchal and state violence from dissident expressions in the formal and political spheres. The third program culminates with an epic that crosses borders and records to embody the experiences of armed struggle and the promise of revolution.

The series focuses on film production in Central America in the seventies and eighties, when the region’s cinema sought to expand its visual history and became a tool for identity and political construction.

Together with independent filmmakers from inside and outside the region, various organizations, institutions and groups sought to dialogue directly with both the singularity of their immediate context and the anti-imperialist fervor that swept through Central America: the Film Department in Honduras; his counterpart in Costa Rica; INCINE in Nicaragua; the Experimental Group of University Cinema in Panama; the Cinematography of Guatemala and, in El Salvador, the collectives Taller de los Vagos, Cero a la Izquierda and Sistema Radio Venceremos.