Afternoons of Solitude

For his first documentary, the Catalan auteur Albert Serra trains an unblinking camera on a single figure: Andrés Roca Rey, the young Peruvian star who is among the most celebrated — and most divisive — bullfighters in the world. The film follows him through the ritual of the corrida, from the slow, almost priestly act of dressing in the traje de luces to the moment he undresses at day's end, and above all into the ring itself, alone before the animal. Around him swirls his cuadrilla, a chorus of men murmuring prayer, encouragement and bravado; before him, the bull.

Serra strips away everything we expect from a film on this subject — no history, no biography, no argument. What remains is pure, saturated presence: the glitter of the costume and the dust of the arena, the grace of the movement and the sweat, terror and blood that come with it. Hypnotic, repetitive and deliberately confrontational, the film holds the beauty and the brutality of the spectacle in a single gaze and leaves the viewer to weigh them.