The National Museum of Cinema inaugurates the Video Room

The National Museum of Cinema inaugurates a new permanent exhibition space: the Video Room. Set up in one of the chapels of the Temple Hall, the space is conceived as a place for visual reflection on contemporary cinema and the forms of audiovisual storytelling, hosting projects “around cinema” that cross genres, formats and platforms.

In an era of profound technological, cultural and linguistic transformation and contamination, the Video Room responds to the need for a presidium on the contemporary imaginary, today profoundly saturated with the audiovisual image.

The first project hosted in the Video Room is Key Words for Key Films, a series of video essays for 2020s cinema. The video essays are produced by graduate students of the Accademia di Architettura at the Università della Svizzera Italiana, under the instruction of Kevin B. Lee, the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts.

The project takes a deceptively simple approach: students select a single word to capture the essence of a film from the 2020s, then explore this term through multiple definitions paired with carefully chosen film clips. This “cinematic dictionary” method reveals how language and moving images can interact to reflect on both the state of cinema and our world today. The resulting collection forms a moving glossary of our cinematic era.

The project introduces for the first time the video essay as a dynamic and autonomous expressive form within the Museum’s displays. While traditional museum videos typically offer either illustration (film clips visualizing information) or explanation (experts discussing topics), these video essays forge a third path that combines visual analysis with poetic reflection, creating works that both illuminate and surprise.

The program is divided into two thematic sections:

• Across the Genres, which examines how different cinematic forms – from horror to science fiction, from documentary to western and animation – continue to evolve and respond to our times.
• Beyond Genres, which looks beyond genre classifications to explore works whose significance resonates more broadly, addressing the urgent questions and experiences that define our decade.

Here the full list of essays in the program