Legendary French cinema magazine Cinema offices I chose the movie Solitary afternoonsBy Catalan director Albert Serra, as the best film of 2025. Read more Battle after battlewritten by Paul Thomas Anderson, LLC Yes! by Lindav Lapid, as well as other new works by Kleber Mendonça Filho, Richard Linklater, and Christian Petzold. Cera already appeared on this list in 2022 with the film Calm down.
Solitary afternoons This is a documentary about Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, winner of the Concha de Oro del Festival de Cine de San Sebastián and very controversial in terms of anti-bullfighting segments as a defense against animal abuse that underlies bullfighting. He watched the bullfights of the killers Andrés Roca Rey and Pablo Aguado for three years, although the latter’s appearance in the film eventually occurred. The film shows the blood and the arena, the pain and agony of death, but also the intimate life of the torio, the preparation for the costume of the lights, the moments before the battles or the trips in the minibus with the bus. Due to his involvement with the director, the National Bullfighting Award was awarded.
“I am a fan of bulls,” says Serra in an interview with this periodical, where he also notes his taste in Manuel Chaves Nogales’ book on Belmont and works on bulls by other authors such as Michel Leiris or Georges Bataille. “But my opinion doesn’t matter much when you make a movie like this. “solitary afternoons”congratulations, “Before these protests demanding the film’s withdrawal, I thought it was childish and ridiculous. It is a work of art. The film is a closed work, and it all has its own reasons for being from an aesthetic point of view. I’m not interested in issues or ideology, just cinema. It is also true that cinema exaggerates reality. I built it out of honesty.
Until now, according to Serra, showing bullfights in cinema has been “impossible” due to the lack of sufficient technology, such as wireless microphones with long-lasting batteries. “Everything above was very schematic or superficial. Ugly. With these cameras, with this search for something interesting, we found at least something. In my background, reality doesn’t matter to me. I’m interested when photos of the race, of Rocca Rai and his team, end up with the spectator a little. When the photo sparks imagination and dreams,” said Serra.
I don’t want to stop being so cruel to Serra at races. “This is part of it,” he said. “Showing this balance was necessary. For me, this death, which raises so much controversy, seems to me poetic.”
Cinema notebooks, One of the reference media for world cinema, Created in 1951 by, among others, the influential critic André Bazin, a few years later it became the bible of the auteur’s cinema and the soup of its cultivation. New mysteriousIt is the avant-garde movement led by some authors such as François Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard.