Afternoons of Solitude

The new film from the visionary director of Pacification, Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude is a spellbinding documentary that turns its gaze on the ceremonial splendor and devastating brutality of bullfighting in Spain. With quiet intensity, Serra follows famed matador Andrés Roca Rey, from the solitude of his hotel room and the meticulousness of his preparations to the charged spectacle of the arena. Through his immersive and unhurried lens, Serra reveals Rey’s profound physical, spiritual, and aesthetic commitment to a centuries-old ritual — one that demands he take part in a timeless duel between man and beast. The film doesn’t tell us what to think about this “sport”, but it makes no bones about its violence and what is at stake here. For many, such a spectacle is abhorrent. But the tradition persists in Spain, and the movie challenges us not to look away.

You don’t have to like bullfighting to watch Afternoons of Solitude with fascination, any more than you have to like crime to enjoy a film noir. I doubt I’d ever attend a corrida — but this new documentary by Albert Serra, about the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, is one of the most transfixing I’ve seen in a while. There’s blood, and it’s not stage blood; Roca gets hurt, and bulls are killed. Yet the effect that the movie elicits isn’t horror but glory. What makes Afternoons of Solitude hard to watch is its assault on assumptions.

Richard Brody, New Yorker

The film’s greatest value is in what it refuses to be. It refuses to either extol or condemn what it is observing. We live in an age of absolutes driven sometimes by the best intentions… Serra rejects the absolutes and engages in this extremely messy corner of contemporary culture with an agnostic’s stance […] Serra’s film, if it argues for anything, stands for the the independence of art from, well, everything else. Art, at this level, can be terrifying.

Robert Kohler, Cineaste

This new documentary by Albert Serra is one of the most transfixing I’ve seen in a while… With its blend of intimacy and majesty, of breathless action and overarching monumentality, he achieves a unity, a synthesis, and a far-reaching vision that he has only occasionally found in fiction.

Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times

This is a major work from a richly maturing filmmaker, of a piece with his recent fiction features in its use of languid repetition and sensory saturation to pull the audience into something approaching a discomfiting dream state.

Guy Lodge, Variety

In its graceful intertwining of meditation and obscenity, Afternoons of Solitude gives an ancient, controversial tradition the chance to shock and awe without hype or favor. It’s inhumane, it’s human and it’s a hell of a film.

Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times