The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, and the director of the Spanish Film Academy, Fernando Méndez-Leite, have announced on Wednesday a new museum dedicated to cinema at the former headquarters of the Non-Do Madrid. The building where the news and documentaries of the Franco regime were prepared and produced, which occupies 4,000 square meters divided into four floors, has been unused for about 15 years. But the project for the moment is just an intention, as Méndez-LEITE said Wednesday in the presentation to the media in the building in question: “There is nothing.” Neither budgets, nor deadlines, nor a clear project. “We are not in a position to know how much it will cost or who will finance,” said Urtasun. The only thing they said is that the financing will be sought by the academy. “As we do with the Goya gala, but first we need to have a project,” Méndez-Leite continued.
The Ministry will “yield” the space to the academy and intends to have “fixed, but also temporary exhibitions and immersive projects in the image and likeness of the great cinema museums,” according to the director of the entity. Urtasun, on the other hand, spoke of “recovering the cinematographic memory” of Spain “recovering and resigning the space.” In addition to “bringing the cinematographic heritage to citizens and value a very important industry in our country.” With the deadlines to be defined, the director of the Academy warns: “It is an immense work that will take us years. The ideas we have about the future are still little defined.”
The proposal to convert the space into a museum had already been done in 2017 the then Secretary of State for Culture, Fernando Benzo, when he announced that the property had been attached to the Ministry of Culture and that the Museum would be created within the framework of the 2020 Culture Plan of the Government of Mariano Rajoy. Six months after the announcement the government changed and the idea was abandoned. Now, with the political future and uncertain terms, the collaborative project between Ministry and Academy is still far from materializing.
The old news and documentaries enclosure – which should be projected in Spanish cinemas between 1942 and 1976 and voluntarily until 1981 – went through different hands before reaching those of the Ministry of Culture. After the closure of Non-Do in 1981, six years after Franco’s death, the building became part of RTVE until 2007, when it was assumed by the Ministry of Public Administrations. In 2010, a significant part of the building was transferred to the Accounting and Audit Institute (ICAC), and since then remains practically inactive. In October 2015, members of the Ultra Collective of neo -Nazi Social Ideology Okupar and remained there for more than a year, until they were evicted by the Police in November 2016.
The grass that grow in the garden, the graffiti of its facade and the empty stays attest to the disuse and glimpse the long road that remains ahead of the project. Inside, the state of conservation is good and the decoration of its main hall remains intact: a sequence of paintings by José Caballero that represent, in ruralist style, the Spain of the time.
All the Spanish historical memory of non-so filmed during the postwar period, 4,011 news that is preserved and another 2,000 historical archives (images, documentaries, monographs, historical archives and the Royal Archive of Alfonso XII) are deposited in the Conservation and Restoration Center of the Spanish Filmoteca, and have been digitized since 2015.