Dir: Albert Serra | Doc 2026
Albert Serra has built a career out of making cinema that resists easy description. From the deliberately primitive medievalism of Honor de cavalleria and Birdsong to the decadent historical fantasia of The Death of Louis XIV, the erotic provocations of Liberté and the feverish tropical intrigue of Pacifiction, his films have tended to turn time, performance and narrative expectation into strangely intoxicating substances. Even last year’s Afternoons of Solitude, his remarkable immersion in the world of bullfighting, approached documentary as if it were another form of fiction. Albert Serra’s cinema has never been especially interested in behaving itself.
Seize moments de ma vie is different. At first glance, it is almost disarmingly straightforward: a filmed performance by Ingrid Caven, the German actress and singer whose career is inseparable from the history of postwar European theatre and cinema. But Serra has no interest in making a conventional portrait of either Caven or her career. Instead, he turns the concert into a sustained encounter between performer, camera and audience.
Caven is the film’s gravitational centre. Her voice has acquired an extraordinary physicality, capable of moving from delicacy to abrasion within a single phrase, while her movements and expressions seem to carry as much meaning as the lyrics. Serra watches rather than explains. The camera observes the changing relationship between Caven and the theatrical space, allowing apparently insignificant gestures to accumulate emotional weight.
That approach marks a striking departure from the narrative constructions of Serra’s historical films. There is no elaborate period world to build and no dramatic plot to propel the film forward. Instead, the director makes duration itself the subject. Songs become episodes; pauses become events; changes of lighting and expression acquire an almost narrative importance.
The film also demonstrates how far Serra has moved towards a cinema of observation. Afternoons of Solitude found its drama in the unpredictable physical reality of bullfighting; here, the drama comes from the instability of live performance. Caven can appear commanding one moment and startlingly vulnerable the next. Serra is alert to both sides without forcing either into a tidy interpretation.
The visual treatment is deliberately theatrical but never merely decorative. Shadows, darkness and the architecture of the stage create a shifting frame around Caven, sometimes making her seem almost isolated from the world outside the performance. The effect is intimate without becoming conventionally sentimental.
There are moments when Serra’s insistence on duration becomes demanding. The film offers little conventional guidance about how we should interpret Caven’s memories or songs, and its refusal to cut away can feel provocative for its own sake. But that resistance is also central to its appeal. Serra wants us to experience the performance rather than consume it as information.
The title promises moments from a life; what Serra delivers is something more elusive. These are not neatly arranged memories but fragments, voices and gestures suspended in the present. His subject is ultimately not biography but the strange ability of performance to make the past temporarily physical.
For a filmmaker whose work has so often been associated with provocation and historical reconstruction, Seize moments de ma vie is an unexpectedly intimate film. It is also a reminder that Serra can make stillness as unsettling as spectacle. The result is austere, eccentric and occasionally mesmerising — a concert film that gradually reveals itself as another of his experiments with what cinema can do with time..
It is an unusual film, sometimes maddening, often beautiful, and finally difficult to shake off. Serra has made a concert film that behaves like a memory — fragmented, sensual, disorientating and refusing to end when you expect it to.
LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2026