Culture gives the former headquarters of the Academy to create the first Spanish cinema museum
Despite several private initiatives, Spain did not have, until now, with a cinema museum. While each country usually has one or more dedicated to the history of the seventh art – in cities like Berlin or Turin – here it was still not shaped to an initiative that had already had several attempts that had remained on the road. Finally, Ernest Urtasun has announced that the former headquarters of the Non-Do will transfer to the Spanish Academy of Spain, a building of more than 4,000 square meters in the Velázquez street, for the creation of the first Spanish cinema museum.
Urtasun has presented it since the same headquarters of the future museum with Fernando Méndez-Leite, president of the Academy, who recalled that he worked in that same building and that this is a dream project and desired by the Academy for many years. It will be the institution that presides over the one in charge of the project, which will have the support of culture. In the act, defined as a first step, no deadlines, budgets or any concrete data have been taken. It will be the Academy, in fact, who has to look for public and private funds to lift it, in a project reminiscent of the Hollywood Academy Museum in Los Angeles.
In 2017, the Minister of Popular Culture Iñigo Méndez de Vigo chose that same location for that same project. He announced the creation of a cinema museum, but that announcement remained in the air. The works never began, nor the processes to provide it with budget or content. Now it seems that culture and, mainly, the Film Academy, Fernando Méndez-Leite, intend to achieve what has been a non-compliance promise.
The non-do building; where since 1942 the news and documentaries of the Francoism were elaborated and produced was used by RTVE until 2007, and since then it has been the subject of several disputes. He was two times for the extreme right -wing group of Social Madrid and, recently, the Madrid City Council urged culture to rehabilitate it and use it, although from the Consistory they bet to settle the new offices of the Ministry of Finance there.
