Museu del Cinema - Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol

Before the movies, there was the urge to make images move

Girona’s Museu del Cinema begins its story before the first film screening. Its permanent exhibition follows the devices, optical experiments, and visual entertainments that led to cinema, giving the medium a longer history than the familiar arrival of the Lumière brothers. The collection was assembled by filmmaker and collector Tomàs Mallol, whose interest in pre-cinema and early film gives the museum an unusually personal point of view.

The museum opened in 1998 around the collection and has since grown into a center for film culture, with temporary exhibitions, guided visits, educational programs, a specialized library, and courses. Its 2026–27 exhibition on filmmaker Joaquim Jordà revisits his career through his documentary archive and cameras from the museum’s collection. For visitors, the experience is part hands-on history of visual storytelling and part invitation to look at cinema as technology, craft, and cultural memory.