MILAN – Fondazione Prada will stage a multisensory exhibition created by Academy Award-winning Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
Titled “Sueño Perro: A Film Installation by Alejandro G. Iñárritu,” the show will be rooted in the intersection of cinema and visual art and mark the 25th anniversary of “Amores Perros,” the director’s acclaimed debut feature film, which paved the way to his other cinema cornerstones such as “21 Grams,” “Babel,” “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” to name a few.
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The exhibition will open at Fondazione Prada’s outpost in Milan on Sept. 18 and run through Feb. 26, as well as being on view in other prominent international institutions, including LagoAlgo in Mexico City from Oct. 5 to Jan. 4 and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or LACMA, in spring 2026.
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“With this project, we aim to open new perspectives on Iñárritu’s work and on a film that, from its very start, combined the force of realism with the density of symbolism. Twenty-five years after it was released, ‘Amores Perros’ continues to speak to the present and to capture, with visual and emotional power, the full complexity of the world we live in,” said Miuccia Prada, who is president and director of the foundation.
The show will delve into the cultural and cinematographic dimension of the critically and commercially successful movie, which is narratively structured around three intersecting stories, all connected by a car crash in Mexico City and unified through recurring themes of violence, betrayal, fractured masculinity and the symbolic presence of dogs.
The installation will display never-before-seen footage. The gritty vignettes, once abandoned on the cutting room floor and conserved for a quarter of a century in the film archives at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, capture the charged and interconnected sociopolitical realities of Mexico City and Iñárritu reimagined their impact through a mosaic of celluloid and sound.
“Over a million feet of film were left on the cutting room floor during the editing of ‘Amores Perros’. These intensely charged images, 16 million still frames, were buried in the UNAM film archives for 25 years,” said Iñárritu. “On the occasion of the film’s anniversary, I felt compelled to revisit and re-explore these abandoned fragments, with the grain and the ghosts of celluloid which they hold. Stripped of all narrative, this installation is not a tribute, but a resurrection — an invitation to feel what never was. Like meeting an old friend we have never seen before.”
Visitors will walk into a dimly lit labyrinth illuminated by 35mm analog projectors, casting a continuous stream of newly juxtaposed fragments from the movie. Slates, celluloid scratches, light flares between reels and a soundscape produced specifically for the occasion will add to the experience.
Iñárritu’s installation will be staged on the ground floor of the Podium, the main exhibition space. As part of the project, a visual and sound display conceived by Mexican writer and journalist Juan Villoro will be hosted on the first floor of the building.
Titled “Mexico 2000: The Moment That Exploded,” this additional project will offer a second layer of narrative from a different perspective, mixing audio content and an array of press clippings and documentary photographs to further help the audience to delve into the cultural, social and political contexts of Mexico City in the early 2000s.
“Filmed at a ‘moment of change’, ‘Amores Perros’ did not reflect the end of an era but rather the beginning of a downfall. Twenty-five years later, its social relevance is alarming: what was happening then is still happening now. Its explosion is still ongoing,” said Villoro.
Flanking the showcases, a special edition of the book “Amores Perros,” co-published by Mack and Fondazione Prada, will dig into the movie’s visual language and creative process via backstage images, film stills and storyboards. It will feature a foreword by Prada, a text by Iñárritu himself and contributions by the likes of acclaimed directors Denis Villeneuve and Walter Salles, award-winning novelists Jorge Volpi and Wendy Guerra, film critic Elvis Mitchell and the film’s storyboard artist Fernando Llanos.
The show next fall marks Fondazione Prada’s third collaboration with Iñárritu. He conceived the film program “Flesh, Mind and Spirit” in Seoul and Milan in 2009 and 2016, respectively, as well as the experimental VR installation “Carne y Arena” in Milan in 2017.