Albert Serra is one of the most expressive slow cinema directors. Weaving smoothly between cinema and the visual arts, the director and artist, says, "I am a radical Catalan, a Spaniard from the depths of my heart and a soldier of Old Europe." Serra, a provocative minimalist, challenges the audience by creating films that drown in the darkness, in the literal and metaphoric screen chiaroscuro, in his stories about the world's moral collapse. Serra reaches most often for cultural texts, revives the mythical past by reducing historical events to eccentric anecdotes and throwing legendary figures into the vortex of mundane daily chores. After the anti-adaptation of Cervantes's Don Quixote (Honor of the Knights, 2006), making a biblical parable about the Three Kings (Birdsong, 2008), he filmed an eighteenth-century dispute between rationalism and romanticism in the form of an encounter between Casanova and Dracula in the Story of My Death (2013), and then exposed absurdity of the Versailles court in a chronicle of the slow agony of the Sun King in the Death of Louis XIV. Motifs of stillness, expectation and boredom make up the Catalan's visual language. Serra is an ironic moralist, portraying and parodying the pillars of European civilization, showing that the king is not only naked, but also quite dead, pleasure does not exist without perversion, and true freedom can only be found in the violation of norms.
Albert Serra is a Catalonian director and producer born in Banyoles in 1975. He studied Spanish and Comparative Philology at the University of Barcelona. His second film, Quixotic/Honor de Cavelleria, a loose adaptation of the story of Don Quixote, appeared in the section Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Cannes in 2006. Serra’s second film of 2008, Birdsong, found itself in the program Un Certain Regard, a prestigious section of the Cannes festival, and it was also recognized as the best Catalonian film of the year.
Selected filmography:
2003 Crespiá
2006 Honor rycerza / Honor de cavallería / Honor of the Knights
2008 Śpiew ptaków / El cant dels ocells / Birdsong
2010 Els noms de Crist / The Names of Christ
2013 Historia mojej śmierci / Història de la meva mort / The Story of My Death
2016 Śmierć Ludwika XIV / Last Days of Louis XIV / La Mort de Louis XIV
2018 Roi Soleil
2019 Liberté
Partner: Institut Ramon Llull
