El Futuro Ya No Está Aquí offers viewers perspectives on Spain's journey towards liberation and transition to democracy, and also on Movida and its manifestations, through cinema.

The title of this program refers to 1981, when Spanish band Radio Futura was proclaiming widely in their hit “Enamorado de la moda juvenil” that “el futuro ya está aquí”. The future, this song was referring to, was capturing that feeling of freedom that Spanish society was beginning to experience from the moment the right wing government fell. 

Spain was living in a time of hope and liberation, an accelerated period in which the country strove to catch up to many modern European countries. As artist Luis López Carrasco (featured in the programme) states, "Spain, after centuries of delay, was going to become a European country overnight." The transition from dictatorship to democracy prompted conflicting emotions of regret, resentment, confusion, and relief, as well as new sentiments arising from the expression of previously suppressed identities. 

It is within this context that we should place La Movida, a countercultural movement that occurred predominantly in Madrid in the early '80s. Despite the numerous disagreements it generates, it came to symbolize change and the arrival of modernity in post-Franco Spain. As  Pedro Almodóvar puts it, "It's difficult to speak of La Movida and explain it to those who didn't live those years. We weren't a generation; we weren't an artistic movement; we weren't a group with a concrete ideology. We were simply a bunch of people that coincided in one of the most explosive moments in the country.”

During the Spanish transition to democracy, a lack of consensus on key political issues caused uncertainty, tension and violence in society. The persistence of Francoist leaders in positions of power fueled disillusionment among many Spaniards, who felt that the chance for a real break with repressive Francoism had been lost. The term "desencanto" emerged to describe this feeling of dissatisfaction and mistrust towards political institutions and parties.

This film program also analyzes how the legacy of Franco's regime continues to affect Spanish society today and how El Desencanto that gripped Spanish society during his regime did not disappear with the advent of democracy. At the time, an ironic statement by Vásquez Montalban was notorious: “Contra Franco se vivia mejor”.
Throughout May and eight feature films, it aims to present an integrated view of artistic and ethical expressions that define trends and movements to this day. As a whole, the program includes disparate works in terms of themes and filmic forms, sharing however a certain strength that brings them to a common place of radical, transgressive, and oppositional cinema.

The program showcases significant examples of "quinqui" authors, such as Eloy de la Iglesia and Carlos Saura. Quinqui cinema is a subgenre of Spanish cinema that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, captures the raw, unfiltered reality of the so-called "quinquis”: young delinquents from marginalized neighborhoods involved in petty crime, drug use, and other forms of social deviance. The quinqui films feature amateur actors, struggling to find their place in a rapidly changing society, who were plucked from the streets and trained to act, and were often shot on location in the very neighborhoods where they lived. Few of the survived the period due to drug abuse and crime.

During this time, new expressions of queer and trans cinema, previously prohibited appeared. This film program will showcase seminal works in the pioneering genre of queer cinema, illuminating the lives of the LGBTQIA+ community. The aim is also to understand the evolution of the representation of sexual and gender identities in Spanish cinema, and how it has influenced Spanish culture and society.

The programe includes one of the first examples of cinema verité in Spain, directed by the country’s first feminist film director Josefina Molina. The first documentary that gives a voice to women of that time who were fighting for equality and a place in society. Connecting with the idea of providing voice to women, we will make a reflexion about cinema dubbing in Spain during the dictatorship and how it was a key tool of censorship and manipulation by the regime. The artist Julia de Castro, in a new commissioned piece by Batalha, will work around this idea to be reversed in the performance ̈Voces que aparecen’, recovering the silenced voices of female artists from the late Franco period. 

The program also highlights cinematographic expressions from the Movida, with Almodovar and Zulueta as its maximum exponents, representing a postmodern, underground, punk movement attentive to international trends in fashion, music, and juvenile sexual liberation. This is an aesthetic cinema driven by cultural ideas that are distant from political and party discussions, led by a generation that did not experience the harshest period of the dictatorship and that embraces new concerns and expressions, including leisure ones. With Madrid as the epicenter and a PSOE open to new youth culture, the generation that doesn't speak of Franco emerges, exploring different contexts, aesthetic formulas, modes of encounter (in rock and punk clubs like Rock Ola), and drug experiences. Zulueta's "Arrebato" amplifies these ideas, surreally linking film consumption to celuloide print use, in a vampire fiction.

The film "El Futuro", by Luis López Carrasco, which we present in a installed version, is a call to awaken from the dream of that simulation and to construct a critical discourse against the celebratory narrative of the Transition. It confronts the consequences of the void that opened up with the party of the 80s. 

Despite all contends and tensions, from the late 70s, everything was future in Spain. Sparking meaningful conversations around the power of cultural production of the period, El futuro ya no está aquí explores the wounds from this process that are yet to be healed.