Afternoons of Solitude

dir. Albert Serra · 2025

Snapshot

Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad) is Albert Serra's first feature-length documentary, a sustained, near-clinical observation of the Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey across the ritualized arc of his working day — vesting in the hotel room, the drive to the ring, the corrida itself, and the unmaking afterward. It marks a conspicuous departure for Serra, who built his reputation on slow, anachronistic fictions populated by literary and historical figures (Don Quixote, Casanova, Louis XIV, Dracula). Here he turns the same patient, anti-dramatic gaze on a living person and a living, bleeding spectacle. The film premiered in competition at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in September 2024, where it won the Golden Shell (Concha de Oro) for best film, and circulated theatrically into 2025. It arrives as both a continuation of Serra's project — duration, ritual, the body confronting its own extinction — and a provocation, since bullfighting is among the most politically and ethically charged subjects a contemporary European filmmaker could choose. The film does not editorialize in any conventional sense; it watches, at length and in punishing close-up, and lets the watching become the argument.

Industry & production

The film was produced through Serra's Barcelona-based company Andergraun Films, the vehicle for most of his work and the structural home of his repertory crew, in co-production arrangements typical of European art-cinema financing (Spanish and French partners, festival- and subsidy-oriented funding). Precise budget and recoupment figures are not part of the reliable public record, and I will not invent them; Serra's films operate at the low-budget, auteur-driven end of the spectrum, financed against festival prestige and distribution pre-sales rather than commercial expectation. What distinguishes the production logistically is access: shooting a top-tier active matador across multiple corridas, in the callejón and the ring, required cooperation from Roca Rey, his cuadrilla, and the bullfighting establishment — a notable feat given how guarded that world is and how hostile much of the cultural press is toward it. Serra reportedly amassed a very large quantity of footage across a season of bullfights, from which the final film was distilled, a working method consistent with his practice of shooting with multiple cameras and editing for rhythm and accumulation rather than to a script. The San Sebastián Golden Shell — awarded by a jury, in 2024, and a major imprimatur for a Spanish-language film at Spain's premier festival — functioned as the film's principal launch into international distribution and the art-house circuit.

Technology

Serra's contemporary work is built on digital capture with multiple cameras running simultaneously, a method he has described as a way of seizing performance and contingency without imposing classical coverage — he shoots abundantly and discovers the film in the edit. Afternoons of Solitude depends on this approach and pushes it toward telephoto intimacy: the bullring sequences are dominated by long lenses that compress space and isolate the matador and the bull against blurred, abstracted backgrounds, collapsing the public spectacle into a private, almost two-body confrontation. The film's force comes substantially from this optical choice — the long lens turns a stadium event into a chamber drama. The image is high-resolution and saturated, attentive to the textures of the traje de luces, blood, sand, and sweat. I won't claim specific camera bodies, lens kits, or aspect-ratio decisions as fact, since those technical particulars are not securely documented in the public record; what is evident on screen is a digital, multi-camera, long-lens regime deployed for proximity and duration rather than spectacle-coverage.

Technique

Cinematography

The cinematography is the film's dominant expressive instrument. Two registers alternate: the hermetic interior of the hotel room — frontal, patient framings of the dressing ritual, the matador handled by his attendants like an icon being prepared — and the ring, rendered almost entirely in compressed telephoto. In the faena sequences the camera holds close on Roca Rey's face and torso and on the bull's labored, wounded body, frequently excluding the crowd and the wider geometry of the plaza. This produces a deliberate disorientation: we rarely get the establishing master that conventional bullfighting coverage relies on, so the encounter feels claustrophobic and abstracted from its social frame. The visual style refuses the heroic, sun-drenched iconography of traditional taurine imagery; instead it forces an unblinking confrontation with the animal's suffering and the man's strain, fear, and exhaustion. The long lens both glamorizes (isolating the matador in shallow focus, a figure of intense concentration) and indicts (denying us the comfortable distance of the grandstand). The work is credited to Serra's longtime cinematographer-collaborator Artur Tort, who has been central to the look of Serra's recent features.

Editing

The editing is where Serra's surplus footage becomes form. Rather than build suspense toward the kill in classical fashion, the film accumulates: repeated passes of the cape, repeated dressings and undressings, the recurrence of the same gestures across different afternoons, until ritual reveals itself as repetition. The cutting is patient and rhythmic, content to dwell, and structured around the day's liturgy — preparation, transit, performance, aftermath — rather than around a rising-action narrative. The bull's death is not treated as a climactic payoff but as one more brutal recurrence within a cycle. This editorial logic — duration, repetition, the refusal of conventional dramatic shaping — is the through-line connecting this documentary to Serra's fiction features. Editing on Serra's films has typically been a collaborative function involving Serra and his core crew, with Artur Tort again among the key figures; I won't assign sole credit beyond what the film's authorship structure supports.

Mise-en-scène / staging

As a documentary of an event Serra did not direct, the "staging" is double. In the hotel room, Serra controls framing and arranges his observation of a ritual that is itself highly choreographed — the matador's body as a passive object being clothed, the attendants moving with priestly economy. In the ring, the staging is the bullfight's own, but Serra's selection and framing re-stage it as intimate theater. The cuadrilla's coarse, encouraging, sometimes vulgar verbal support — the men around Roca Rey praising and goading him — becomes a kind of running chorus, exposing the masculine, performative culture surrounding the matador. The mise-en-scène thus oscillates between the sacred (the vesting, lit and composed like a religious tableau) and the profane (the locker-room talk, the gore), and the tension between those registers is a principal subject.

Sound

Sound is used with characteristic Serra austerity: there is essentially no conventional musical score driving emotion. The film leans on direct, recorded sound — the matador's breathing, the snorting and thudding of the bull, the snap of the cape, the cuadrilla's chatter and exclamations, the crowd as an ambient mass rather than a manipulated dramatic presence. This absence of score is itself a technique, denying the viewer the emotional cushioning that music would provide and leaving the spectacle harshly unmediated. The intimate sound of effort and animal distress, foregrounded against the long-lens image, intensifies the sense of a private ordeal. Where the record is thin on specific sound-design credits I won't speculate; the aesthetic effect — sparse, direct, scoreless — is unambiguous on screen.

Performance

The "performance" is Roca Rey's, in two senses: the bullfighter's craft, and his self-presentation as a man performing courage. Serra's camera captures both the practiced artistry and the involuntary signals — fear, pain when gored or thrown, the vanity and ritual self-regard of the dressing room. There is no narration, no interview, no psychological exposition; Roca Rey is revealed entirely through observed behavior and the talk around him. The film's portraiture is cumulative and behavioral rather than confessional, and its refusal to let the subject explain himself is part of its severity.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film is observational and structural rather than narrative. It has no plot in the conventional sense, no biographical arc, no backstory, no resolution — only the recurring shape of the bullfighting day, iterated until pattern becomes meaning. Its dramatic mode is ritual and repetition: dress, fight, kill, undress, repeat. This aligns it with the durational, anti-psychological tradition of contemplative cinema and with Serra's own fiction, where "story" is subordinated to process, atmosphere, and the slow exposure of a body in time. The drama, such as it is, is ontological — a man repeatedly placing himself at risk of death, an animal repeatedly killed — rather than incident-driven.

Genre & cycle

Nominally a documentary, the film sits within the "observational/contemplative documentary" lineage while bearing the unmistakable signature of a fiction auteur. It belongs to a cycle of arthouse nonfiction that treats ritualized labor and the body with anthropological patience and formal rigor. As bullfighting cinema, it is consciously antithetical to the romantic, nationalist taurine tradition; it offers neither celebration nor explicit denunciation but a forensic confrontation that destabilizes both pro- and anti-bullfighting frames. Within Serra's filmography it forms a clear pairing with his death-haunted fictions, especially the deathbed durational study The Death of Louis XIV, and extends his recurring fascination with masculinity, performance, and mortality seen in Liberté and Pacifiction.

Authorship & method

Serra (b. 1975, Banyoles, Catalonia) is among the most distinctive auteurs in contemporary European cinema, known for radical duration, anachronism, multi-camera improvisatory shooting, and the discovery of the film in the editing room. His method — shoot enormous amounts of material with several cameras, then sculpt rhythm and meaning in post — is uniquely suited to documentary, and Afternoons of Solitude can be read as that method finally meeting a real-world subject equal to its obsessions. The film's authorship is inseparable from Serra's core collaborators, above all Artur Tort, who has functioned as cinematographer and editor and a central creative partner across Serra's recent features and shares responsibility for this film's look and cut. The deliberate absence of a conventional composed score is itself an authorial signature; Serra's films generally eschew emotive scoring in favor of direct sound and, occasionally, sparse sonic interventions. (Marc Verdaguer has contributed music/sound to Serra's work elsewhere; I won't assert a specific scoring credit here beyond the film's evident scorelessness.) There is no screenwriter in the fiction sense — the "writing" is the structural and editorial design imposed on captured reality.

Movement / national cinema

Serra is a leading figure of a contemporary Catalan and Spanish art-cinema current, internationally networked through the festival system and aligned with the global tendency variously called "slow cinema" or contemplative cinema. His sensibility is more continental-European and avant-garde than mainstream Spanish; he emerged from Catalonia's experimental scene and has been embraced by Cannes, Venice, Locarno, and San Sebastián. Afternoons of Solitude is, however, pointedly Spanish in subject — bullfighting being a contested emblem of Spanish national identity — and its Golden Shell win at San Sebastián gave a Spanish festival's highest honor to a film that interrogates one of Spain's most divisive cultural institutions.

Era / period

The film is a product of the mid-2020s, a moment when bullfighting in Spain is under intensifying ethical and political pressure, animal-welfare consciousness is high, and the practice is defended as heritage by some and condemned as cruelty by others. The film's refusal to resolve into either advocacy or condemnation is legible as a response to this polarized present: it confronts contemporary audiences with imagery many would prefer mediated or suppressed. It also belongs to a period in which durational, observational nonfiction has gained serious festival standing, making a 2024–25 art-house audience receptive to a near-two-hour scoreless study of ritualized killing.

Themes

The governing themes are mortality, ritual, and the performance of masculinity. The bullfight becomes a literal staging of the proximity of death — the matador courting it, the bull subjected to it — and the film's repetitions frame death as routine labor rather than tragic event. Solitude, named in the title, runs throughout: the existential isolation of the man in the ring, surrounded by spectators and attendants yet fundamentally alone before the animal. Spectacle and complicity are central: by withholding the comfortable grandstand view and forcing intimacy with suffering, the film implicates the act of watching itself, asking what it means to make and to consume images of real violence and real death. The vesting ritual foregrounds the body as icon and as sacrifice, lending the proceedings a religious-ceremonial undertone. And the cuadrilla's verbal culture exposes the bravado, vanity, and homosocial bonds that sustain the matador's courage.

Reception, canon & influence

Critically, the film was received as a major and divisive work. Its Golden Shell at San Sebastián 2024 established it immediately as a significant title and the most acclaimed documentary of Serra's career, and it drew strong notices for its formal audacity and the intensity of its long-lens imagery. It was equally a lightning rod: the subject guaranteed that some viewers and commentators would object on ethical grounds, and the film's unflinching depiction of the bull's suffering provoked walkouts and debate — precisely the friction Serra's confrontational method courts. The film's influences run backward into the contemplative-cinema tradition and into Serra's own oeuvre — the durational deathwatch of The Death of Louis XIV, the nocturnal corporeal study of Liberté, the atmospheric dread of Pacifiction — as well as into a broader European art-documentary lineage that approaches ritual and labor with anthropological patience. Its relationship to the taurine imagery of Spanish art and cinema is adversarial rather than continuous: it borrows the iconography in order to strip away its romance. As for its forward legacy, the film is recent enough that its lasting influence cannot yet be assessed honestly; what can be said is that it confirms documentary as a viable and powerful register for Serra's method and stands as a landmark instance of a fiction auteur turning duration and observation onto one of the most ethically fraught spectacles in contemporary culture. Any claim beyond that would be premature, and the historical record on this point is, by definition, still open.