On the occasion of the 65th edition of the Festival dei Popoli – International Documentary Film Festival, the spaces of the Strozzina host a tribute to Albert Serra, one of the most appreciated filmmakers on the contemporary scene and one with a strong predilection for installation practice and museum context. In this context, some of his most personal films will be shown, dedicated to the relationship between art and reality and the theme of performance, all in national premiere.
Against Reality | Talk
Tuesday 5 November 2024, 15.00
Strozzina, conference room
Free access subject to availability
Notoriously provocative, the Catalan filmmaker claims that documentary cinema is for directors who lack imagination (sic) but he just won the main prize in San Sebastian’s festival with a plain documentary like Afternoons of Solitude and his work is rooted in a close, constant dialogue with the concrete physicality of spaces and bodies and in a peculiar relationship between camera and filmed locations, director and cast. Taking this as a point of departure, the conversation will focus on how pursuing an alienating effortlessness plays a major role in his filmmaking, thus dissolving the preconception that sees documentary and fiction at opposite ends.
Talk hosted by Alessandro Stellino, artistic director of Festival dei Popoli
The Names Of Christ | Screening
Tuesday 5 November 2024, 16.00
Strozzina
Free access subject to availability
A fourteen-part series made for the Barcelona museum of contemporary art based on the play with the same title that Fray Luis de Leon wrote in 1586 while the Inquisition was in full swing. In as many chapters as were the stations of Christ’s martyrdom, the series deals with the difficulties in financing a so-called “artist’s film” and related themes, such as the relationship of artist and client, the way the audience dwells in the museum spaces, and the relationship between exhibition and exhibit. Putting himself at stake – and on stage – Albert Serra conducts a pungent satire on the art world and an ironic, layered reflection on filmmaking in which dialogues between several figures alternate with film clips of the late Hollywood Golden Age (Cecil B. DeMille, Raoul Walsh, King Vidor), theology, satire, poetic research, and reflection on form. An open form that says a lot on the cultivated, iconoclastic spirit of the Catalan filmmaker and on his faith in the freedom of the creative act.
The Lord Worked Wonders In Me | Screening
Wednesday 6 November 2024, 17.00
Strozzina
Free access subject to availability
A portion of the crew of Albert Serra’s Quixotic/Honor de Cavalleria, inspired by Cervantes’ masterpiece, goes to La Mancha to see the actual setting of Don Quixote’s actions for the sake of a new film. When they realize those landscapes have disappeared, they begin filming inside the hotel and on board the van with which they travel, making a film that records daily situations and little gestures of intimacy: people who relax between a take and the next, discuss, eat, drink, bathe in the river, and wait the film director in a barren, sun-beaten landscape. As part of a project for the Barcelona Centre of Contemporary Culture, in which Serra and Lisandro Alonso agree to exchange film letters discussing their previous works, the Spanish director makes a film in a film, a reflection on – his, but not exclusively – cinema, time, and the way in which this is shared on set, outlining an affectionate portrait of his entourage.
Albert Serra
The Catalan film director, a Cannes darling who conquered the Pardo d’Oro in Locarno in 2013 and the Concha de Oro at the latest San Sebastian Film Festival, has been pursuing a personal stylistic research which, over the past few years, has imposed him as a brilliant interpreter of modernity, developing the germs of classical tradition to conceive new possibilities for the future of cinema.
A cultured aesthete with flair, known for his provocative statements, Serra is comfortable in various productive situations. Each time he reinvents his artistic gesture with an enviable picaresque approach, bewildering with each new film, experimenting with form, and conducting a reflection through images that has always embraced history, philosophy, art history, literary mythologies, and rituality of the present with a view to new horizons.
Cover: Albert Serra, © Óscar Fernández Orengo