Wed 19 – Thu 27 April 2023

All of Serra’s films are in some way a reimagining of the quest landscape, a journey where the viewer is encouraged to observe in an unhurried manner the world of the characters – figures whose all too human frailties are always on show. El Señor ha fet en mi meravelles/The Lord Worked Wonders in Me (2011) revisits the landscape of the legendary Don Quixote but this time in La Mancha, part of a project realised for Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània where Serra exchanged filmed letters with Argentine director Lisandro Alonso. This engaging road movie in search of a landscape that no longer exists, is a metanarrative that captures something of the Quixotic absurdity of filmmaking, a ‘making of’ in conversation with his past films, a film, like Truffaut’s La nuit Américaine/ Day for Night (1973) where everything threatens to fall apart but just about manages to stay together. Failure is an all too real possibility in Serra’s work.

Societies in transition and moments of change mark Història de la meva mort/Story of My Death (2013) and La mort de Louis XIV/The Death of Louis XIV (2016). The former sees a middle-aged Casanova in dialogue with Dracula – two philosophical visions (rationalism and romanticism) in conflict. The latter set in 1715 and featuring Truffaut icon Jean-Pierre Léaud in the title role, is another exercise in waiting – the days and hours leading to the French monarch’s death played out with a painterly intimacy as the court observes in performative denial. Liberté (2019), a reflection on voyeurism as the core of what it means to watch a film, makes for uncomfortable viewing. Pacifiction (2022), marked by the languid pacing and astute eye for composition that has distinguished all his films to date, eschews the historical prisms of his most recent work for a present-day exploration of the rituals and routines of a French high commissioner at work and play in Tahiti. As with Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017), colonialist abuses and corruptions are at the heart of a study of power that is unafraid of exploring the sinister absurdities that underpin the bureaucratic systems created to impose control and authority. Serra delivers, as with all his work to date, a singular vision, a model of filmmaking that is slow, gloriously sedate, cinematic, and ambitious. Albert Serra divides audiences – loathed and loved, admired, and denigrated – but as this season demonstrates, his is a body of work unafraid to ask what cinema is and should be, a cinema of patience where mood trumps narrative, and where myth, fiction, and literature intersect to beguiling effect.

Fri 21 April, 6:20pm
Honour of the Knights (Honor de cavallería) + Q&A
Maria Delgado joins Albert Serra for a conversation following the screening of the Catalan filmmaker’s debut.

Albert Serra’s latest work is a hypnotic, dark film centering on a government official in Tahiti who embodies the greed, hypocrisy and paranoia of colonial power.

Albert Serra’s sophomore feature accompanies the Three Wise Kings on a search for the newborn baby Jesus.

Part of the crew of Honour of the Knights travels to La Mancha to see the real settings of Quixote’s life in order to shoot a film.

A baroque reflection on pleasure and erotic desire dramatised from an imagined meeting between the ageing Casanova and Count Dracula.

Closing Night: The Death of Louis XIV (La mort de Louis XIV)