Madrid, Ext.

This film essay is an intimate and critical homage to Madrid, a city in constant mutation, caught between memory and the desire for the future. Through an extensive visual and sound archive, the multiple faces of the capital are explored: its streets that resist the passage of time, its neighborhoods that change their skin, its inhabitants who, like living echoes, narrate the everyday and anonymous history of the city.

Madrid appears here as a vibrant crossroads of opposites: commerce and urban wildlife, monumental architecture and invisible corners, century-old haberdasheries and ephemeral shop windows, neighborhood poets and shadows of destruction. The camera moves between the intimate and the public, pausing on the minimal details that compose the urban soul: a lady sweeping her sidewalk, a cat sleeping in the window of a closed establishment, a poem scrawled on a wall about to be demolished.

Time, like layer upon layer of dust and progress, becomes visible in the textures of the city. The narrative progresses without a central narrator, guided by the fragmented voices of those who inhabit it, build it, and also lose it. In the face of the advance of cranes and speculation, this film becomes an act of resistance, an affective archive of what remains and what has already gone. A polyphonic and contradictory portrait of Madrid, where the past does not completely leave and the future has not yet finished arriving.