Promoted by the Madrid City Council through its Culture, Tourism and Sport Area, the event will extend its programming to other key cultural spaces such as the Filmoteca Española, the Reina Sofía Museum, La Casa Encendida, and the Goethe-Institut. The programming committee has prioritized auteur documentary cinema, support for Spanish cinema, and dialogue with film history.

The central theme of the 2026 edition, 'Taking the Pulse', seeks to revitalize the tradition of direct cinema and its inherent ability to document social and cultural reality authentically and without artifice. This approach represents a defense of the immediate recording that defines observational documentary.

This trend, which had seen a decline in recent years in favor of more essayistic formats, is experiencing a resurgence. Faced with the complexity of the current landscape, numerous filmmakers are returning to the streets to film events around them without mediation, a trend that Documenta Madrid aims to reflect.

Prior to the official start of the festival, Cineteca Madrid will host a special cycle during May, which will serve as a preview and expansion of some of the proposals to be presented in the main edition.

The festival's inauguration will feature Rivisitazione dello sciopero, an audiovisual experience based on an unfinished documentary by Pier Paolo Pasolini about the first street sweepers' strike in Italy in 1970. The original materials, recovered in 2005 after decades of disappearance, have been transformed by Cosimo Terlizzi and Luca Maria Baldini into a live performance, despite the definitive loss of sound.

For the closing ceremony, the festival will premiere Vial Matadero, an unreleased film by Juan Cavestany. This work was created specifically for this edition and produced by Matadero Madrid and Cineteca Madrid, offering a perspective on Matadero as a symbolic space of urban and social transformation, making it the focus of documentary reflection.