Storyline

1774, a few years before the French Revolution, somewhere between Potsdam and Berlin… Madame de Dumeval, the Duke of Tesis and the Duke of Wand, libertines expelled from the Puritan court of Louis XVI, sought the support of the legendary Duke of Walchen, a seducer and free thinker from Germany, alone in a country where hypocrisy and false virtue reigned. Their mission: to export libertinage to Germany, a philosophy of enlightenment based on the rejection of morality and authority but also, and above all, to find a safe place to continue their misguided games. Read More »

Synopsis:
August 1715. After going for a walk, Louis XIV feels a pain in his leg. The next days, the king keeps fulfilling his duties and obligations, but his sleep is troubled and he has a serious fever. He barely eats and weakens increasingly. This is the start of the slow agony of the greatest king of France, surrounded by his relatives and doctors. Read More »

Matt Zoller Seitz (The New York Times) wrote:
Elmore Leonard once said that the key to telling an exciting story was leaving out the parts that people skip. The “Don Quixote” adaptation “Quxiotic/Honor de Cavalleria” is composed of little else.

In adapting Miguel de Cervantes’s novel about the senile would-be knight, Don Quixote (Lluís Carbó), and his sidekick, Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat), the film’s writer and director, Albert Serra, favors landscape imagery and natural sounds over dialogue and music. Read More »

Filmmaker Albert Serra specifically conceived the series The Names of Christ (2010) for the exhibition Are You Ready for TV? It consists of 14 episodes, with a total duration of 193 minutes, and is based on the book The Names of Christ (1572-1586), by Friar Luis de León. Serra constructs a narrative based on a free, poetic structure, which ironically deconstructs the conventions and grammars of the film, art and television worlds. Read More »

In this short named for the cocktail ordered at the hotel bar of Fassbinder’s BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE, a singer serenades a small crowd in a moody nightclub who all look the part of Fassbinder characters—if not of Fassbinder himself. Serra pays homage not by mimicking Fassbinder’s style but rather by alchemically conjuring the people, places, and modes of performance most identified with him. Read More »

Louis XIV is no newcomer to Albert Serra’s filmography, the hero of his latest opus to date, THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016). ROI SOLEIL features a twin, even though, in the game of differences, it turns out that there are quite a few. Instead of Jean-Pierre Léaud, a non-professionnal actor whom Serra already worked with in his first films. Read More »

The sublime and the mundane run hand-in-hand in Birdsong, Albert Serra’s stunningly photographed, intensely contemplative re-telling of the biblical journey of the Magi. Much of the sublimity derives from the film’s visuals, superbly tactile black-and-white images alive to the textures of the rocky landscape, which, along with the precise gradations of lighting (each scene seems shot at the one exact moment of day when its creation was possible) and the rustling of wind on the soundtrack, imbues the barren land with a richness of meaning commensurate with the Magi’s divine mission. Read More »