Sueño Perro: A Film Installation by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Fondazione Prada will present Sueño Perro: A Film Installation by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, a global multisensory exhibition rooted in the intersection of cinema and visual art, created by Academy Award-winning Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu. In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Amores Perros (2000), his legendary debut feature, Sueño Perro will premiere at Fondazione Prada in Milan from September 18, 2025 to February 26, 2026 (press preview on September 17) and will be on view in prominent international institutions, including LagoAlgo in Mexico City, from October 5, 2025 to January 4, 2026, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in spring 2026.

Sueño Perro marks Fondazione Prada’s third collaboration with Iñárritu, who conceived the film program “Flesh, Mind and Spirit” in Seoul (2009) and Milan (2016), and the experimental VR installation “CARNE y ARENA” in Milan (2017), which was part of the official selection of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and awarded a special Oscar by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As stated by Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada, “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.”

Sueño Perro brings to light never-before-seen footage which speaks to Amores Perros’ enduring themes of love, betrayal, and violence. These 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, still relevant decades later. Drawing on the raw power and visual poetry of these forgotten images, Iñárritu reimagines their impact through a mosaic of celluloid and sound. At the heart of the installation is a deep reverence for the materiality of 35mm film, whose physical grain, flicker, and warmth evoke a deep sense of nostalgia.

As explained by Iñárritu, “Over a million feet of film were left on the cutting room floor during the editing of Amores Perros. These intensely charged images, sixteen million still frames, were buried in the UNAM film archives for 25 years. 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.”

Audiences will walk into a dimly lit labyrinth illuminated by 35mm analog projectors, casting a continuous stream of newly juxtaposed fragments from Amores Perros. A soundscape produced specially for the installation will reverberate throughout, permeating the atmosphere like a dream. Slates, celluloid scratches, and light flares between reels will interrupt the flow, reminding visitors of the medium’s raw physicality. In an age of artificial intelligence and digital oversaturation, Iñárritu invites viewers to step into a man-made, tactile and analog landscape of memory, where the past flickers just out of reach.

Iñárritu’s installation will be on view on the ground floor of the Podium, the main exhibition space of the Milan venue of Fondazione Prada. As part of Sueño Perro, a visual and sound display will be conceived by the Mexican writer and journalist Juan Villoro for the first floor of the building. Titled “Mexico 2000: The Moment that exploded”, it will offer a second layer of narrative from a different perspective. An audio content, along with a vast array of press clippings and documentary photographs by Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, Paolo Gasparini and Enrique Metinides, among others, selected by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, will immerse the audience in the cultural, social, and political contexts of chaotic and intense Mexico City at the beginning of the new Millennium.