Albert Serra: "As Ferran Adrià used to say, to be original it's better not to have masters"

LocarnoMusic has always played a key role in Albert Serra's cinema. Therefore, Seize moments de ma vie, the film-concert that premiered worldwide at the Locarno Festival, is not an exception but a coherent proposal in the career of a filmmaker with a special sensitivity for other literary, scenic, and sound disciplines. The film immerses us in a concert by Ingrid Caven in collaboration with the Molforts (Ferran Font, Enric Juncà, Joe Robinson, and Marc Verdaguer), which took place at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris last year. If in Tardes de soledad, the Banyoles-born filmmaker turned cinema into an space for intimate encounters between the bullfighter, the bull, and the audience in the hall, in Seize moments de ma vie he once again generates this shared space of filmic introspection in which Caven unravels sixteen musical themes inspired by her life, in a comforting sound and light atmosphere where her poignant verses about the traumatic experience of war, the connection with cinema, or the terrible anxieties that appear in the most mundane moments resonate with striking intensity.

Seize moments de ma vie culminates a six-year process of collaboration between Ingrid Caven, Albert Serra and the Molforts. The man from Banyoles and the German actress and singer based in Paris have known each other since she was one of the protagonists of the theatrical version of Liberté premiered at the Volksbühne Berlin in 2018. But Caven ended up out of the final cut of the film of the same name, for reasons beyond both of them: her scenes were shot during the day and the film ended up being nocturnal. To re-establish a relationship that had been strained by this incident, Serra came up with the idea of forging a collaboration between Caven the singer and the Molforts, the musicians with whom he has worked for thirty years on his films, "artists from my town who have great talent". But not a soundtrack or a film, an album. The production got underway without Caven and the Catalan musicians ever meeting. "The Molforts were recording music on a CD in Banyoles, I would take it to Ingrid in Paris, she would listen to it and sing over it, and I would record it on my phone to take it back to Banyoles. I loved being the intermediary, in an artistic collaboration where the musicians and the singer did not communicate". The final editing of the album, Heidschi Bumbeidschi, 16 moments de ma vie, was handled by another producer. And Serra was not happy with it. "I hadn't invested so much time and money for a result I didn't like." And from this came the idea of staging a concert and recording it to regain control over the final work.

Filming a live concert in a single performance presented a challenge for a filmmaker accustomed to shooting hundreds of hours to then finish creating the film during editing. Seize moments de ma vie was filmed in February 2025 with five cameras focused only on what was happening on stage. "The lighting was for theatre and not for cinema, and always keeping the focus was complicated. Besides, we don't shoot cutaway shots. There were only three moments when we ran out of usable footage. Then we used shots of the musician's hand controlling the synthesizer buttons, because it's not a gesture synchronized with the music, as is the case with the guitar or drums".

Collaborator and partner of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a key name in the tradition of German song and muse of Yves Saint Laurent (the dress she wears in the film is a gift from this designer), Caven, 88 years old, explained at the film's presentation how Serra encouraged her to keep working. "I felt protected by his way of doing things. He is brave and takes risks. He doesn't say much, he's not a dictator issuing orders from above, but he always makes his presence felt." For the German singer, the experience meant delving into another musical dimension. "I have had classical training, very different from electronic music. But with the Molforts we didn't work in parallel, but rather we influenced each other.

A door to the future

A whole generational exchange with an actress who is already 88 years old. An age, on the other hand, not so strange in Serra's filmography, who often collaborates with veteran actors. "Spiritually, I have always felt closer to people of this generation. My grandparents were farmers, that is to say, they were closer to the 19th century than the 21st. And I have this affinity with people from those artistic utopias of the sixties, which have influenced me. I like the attitude they have, they don't care what people think. On the other hand, with the technical team, the opposite happens to me. Everyone has made their first feature film with me, they are not cinema professionals, I have never worked with a cinema professional". Serra claims how dispensing with models and internalized learning allows them to "invent things together". And he recalls a quote from Ferran Adrià that he also subscribes to: "To achieve a high level of originality, it is better not to have masters". Seize moments de ma vie, which will premiere in Catalonia at the In-Edit Festival,is the result of this experimentation: a film that "does not so much close a trajectory, but rather opens a door to the future for Ingrid Caven".