17 DIC 2025 – 20 ENE 2026
Filmmaker Isabel Coixet presents ‘Esperando el Domingo… aunque’ (Waiting for Sunday… although), a solo exhibition curated by Mario Gutiérrez Cru with the support of PROYECTOR.
The work Isabel Coixet presents in this space is not a film: it is a confession in images; an exercise in subtle appropriation of everyday life. As if borrowing the streets of the city, those pavements, corners, bodies that cross paths without knowing they will be witnesses, she turns them into intimate scenes, small suspended urban epiphanies. There is a quality of stolen images in this piece, a furtive, perhaps clandestine, record of reality, a fragment of the real that escapes order, that does not ask permission to exist.
Layer upon layer, Coixet mixes this found material with vestiges of film archives: old footage, celluloid textures, cinematic silences converted into contemporary resonances. The result is reminiscent of a dream traversed by memory: the frames slide by like memories emerging from an emotional cartography. It is in this drift that the visual poetry of any given Sunday flourishes.
The pleasant and perhaps even amusing soundtrack acts as a common thread that sets the pace of the piece. It establishes a constant dialogue with the image that almost suggests the title: ‘Waiting for Sunday… even though’, that of an imaginary, uncertain, perhaps utopian Sunday: a possible pause, a fragile refuge, a promise that oscillates between melancholy, laziness and hope.
Thus, ‘Waiting for Sunday… even though’ becomes a tribute to the invisible. To what happens when no one is looking. To what persists even though it seems insignificant. To the everyday that, when recorded without artifice, reveals its intensity. In a world of visual excess, the piece is an act of resistance: recovering a fragment of reality, returning it to the observing eye and offering it again to those who want to look.
OBLIQUO
Calle Valencia 17, Madrid.
Monday to Sunday from 9am to 9pm.
I don’t belong here
1:08
2025
The piece mixes images captured on the street with fragments of old films, creating a dialogue between the present and filmic memory. The editing is fast and sensory, without narration, focusing on the friction between the two times. The soundtrack sets the pace and gives cohesion to the whole, turning this short piece into an intense experience. At this intersection of materials, the feeling that gives the work its title emerges: I don’t belong here. The piece seems to inhabit an intermediate place, a kind of borrowed territory where nothing quite fits. The contemporary images observe a world that continues on its course without stopping; the old images return like ghosts still searching for a place to settle. The result is a brief map of sensitive displacement, an audiovisual moment that floats between times, gazes and memories.
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Isabel Coixet
Isabel Coixet Castillo (Barcelona, 9 April 1960) is one of the most significant authors in contemporary European cinema, a creator whose work—spanning feature films, documentaries, series, advertising pieces, writing and visual art—has played a decisive role in reshaping the narrative sensitivity of Spanish cinema and projecting it onto an international stage. Her gaze, deeply intimate and ethically committed, places Coixet in a singular position: that of a storyteller capable of articulating complex emotions with a visual clarity that avoids artifices and embraces subtlety.
After graduating in History from the University of Barcelona, Coixet entered the professional world through advertising, where she became one of the most prominent filmmakers of her generation. This field provided her with rigorous technical training and a space in which to cultivate expressive precision, narrative economy and an obsessive attention to minimal gestures. She made her film debut with Demasiado viejo para morir joven (Too Old to Die Young, 1989), an early work that already announced her inclination towards vulnerable characters, the emotional weight of silence, and narratives centred on the opaque and sensitive zones of human experience.
Throughout the 1990s, Coixet consolidated her own voice with Things I Never Told You (1996) and A los que aman (1998). The first, shot in English in the United States, revealed her ability to navigate between cultures without losing her authorial voice. The second, a lyrical portrait of idealised love, confirmed her interest in emotional bonds and fragility as an aesthetic force. Both films demonstrate an early mastery of intimate tempo and a commitment to stories rooted in the interiority of their characters.
International recognition arrived with My Life Without Me (2003), produced by El Deseo. Starring Sarah Polley, the film became a milestone in her career: Coixet narrated the life of a woman on the edge of death without slipping into melodrama, crafting instead a delicate reflection on the desire to live. The Secret Life of Words (2005), awarded multiple Goya Awards—including Best Film—deepened this ethical and emotional dimension, exploring trauma and affective recovery from a radically intimate perspective in which silence is often more eloquent than dialogue.
With Elegy (2008), an adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, Coixet achieved wide visibility in the United States. Her direction, focused on the affective layers of the characters, was praised for its maturity and subtlety. Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (2009), which competed in Cannes, marked a shift toward more sensorial territories, turning the city into an emotional landscape reflecting the desires and contradictions of its protagonists. In these years she built a body of work that merges introspection, aesthetic ambition and increasing international resonance.
During the 2010s her work diversified. Ayer no termina nunca (2013) explored the impact of the economic crisis on intimacy through an extreme emotional confrontation. Nadie quiere la noche (2015), which opened the Berlinale, placed two women in an extreme polar landscape transformed into an ethical laboratory on survival, incomprehension and encounter. With The Bookshop (2017), an adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, she returned to a more classical tone, achieving numerous awards, including the Goya for Best Film, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
This period was followed by Elisa & Marcela (2019), which recounts the true story of a romantic relationship between two women in early 20th-century Galicia; Nieva en Benidorm (It Snows in Benidorm, 2020), a Mediterranean noir woven with discreet humour and melancholy; and El techo amarillo (The Yellow Ceiling, 2022), a documentary on sexual abuse in a theatre classroom that reaffirmed her political commitment to silenced voices. With Un amor (2023), an adaptation of Sara Mesa’s novel, Coixet created one of her most dense and emotionally complex works, where the protagonist confronts the limits of intimacy, desire and structural violence.
In 2025 she premiered Tre ciotole, based on Michela Murgia’s book, returning to the idea of farewells as a narrative fabric. Marked by grief and transformation, the film reflects the maturity of a director capable of portraying intimacy with a sensitivity that avoids the obvious and works through suggestion.
Parallel to her film work, Coixet is developing a new fiction series set in Paris for ARTE, strengthening her presence in the European television sphere and her interest in contemporary stories in international contexts. She has also cultivated an artistic practice based on collage. Although this work remained private for years, in 2025 the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presented an exhibition entirely dedicated to her visual pieces, created between 2021 and 2024. These works reveal a deep affinity with her cinema: fragments that speak to each other, found materials transformed into emotional narratives, and compositions oscillating between fragility and force.
Her career has been recognised with numerous awards, including several Goyas, the Creu de Sant Jordi and the Spanish National Cinematography Prize (2020). She has served on juries at major international festivals, taken part in public debates on representation, feminism and narrative ethics, and opened paths for new generations of filmmakers—particularly women.
Over more than three decades, Isabel Coixet has built a cinema defined by emotional intimacy, ethical commitment to her characters and a constant search for new ways of telling stories. Her work, on screen and beyond it, stands as a profound exploration of the human condition, of fragility as a form of strength, of silence as resistance, and of art as a space for repairing, accompanying and understanding.