Afternoons of Solitude

Albert Serra spent three years shooting and two more editing this account of the Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, and it won the Golden Shell at San Sebastián in September 2024 before taking the Goya for Best Documentary. It is the most conventional-sounding project of Serra's career and, in execution, one of his least conventional films.

Artur Tort's cameras stay extremely close — the comparison reviewers reached for was Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait — and hold on the face, the suit of lights, the animal and the sand for far longer than is comfortable. Between the fourteen corridas, Roca Rey is driven, dressed, praised and prayed over by an entourage whose patter repeats until it becomes liturgy. There is no narration, no interview, no historical framing and no argument offered to the viewer, which is precisely what makes the film unbearable to some critics and extraordinary to others.

Cahiers du Cinéma placed it first on its films of the year; it holds 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and 85 on Metacritic. Whether it is a defence of bullfighting or a prosecution of it is a question the film declines to settle, and viewers should know before starting that the violence to the animals is shown at length and without mitigation.