Albert Serra on His New Film: Actors, Climax, and a Total Reversal

That's not a quote cleaned up for press. That's almost verbatim what Albert Serra said at San Sebastián Festival when asked about his next project. His exact claim: the actors are brilliant — all of them, absolutely — the best of any other film. The most original of the year. And the final scene? The best scene in recent cinema.

This is Serra doing what Serra does. He makes extreme claims with total calm, no hedging, no qualification. You can read it as arrogance. I read it as someone who knows what he built and refuses to pretend otherwise.

The interesting thing isn't the self-confidence. It's what comes after. When asked where he'd like the film to screen — distribution, festivals, territory — he shrugs. "That's the international distributor's problem. I have enough problems of my own." And then, quietly: "What doesn't depend on me, I don't worry about."

That's a real position. Not performed indifference. He draws a clean line between what he controls and what he doesn't, and he stays on his side of it.

To understand why Serra's next film is a deliberate reversal, you need to know where he's coming from. Tardes de Soledad — his most recent film — is an immersive portrait of bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. Close, uncomfortable, relentless. The camera doesn't let you look away from the ritual and the blood and the strange solitude of the matador's world.

Sight & Sound's review at the BFI called it an "immersive encapsulation" of that life. That's the right word. You're not watching a documentary about bullfighting. You're inside a world that doesn't explain itself to you.

So when Serra says his next film goes the opposite direction — no paranoia, no moral decay, no latent danger — he's not describing a soft film. He's describing a choice. He already made the dark one. He already made the uncomfortable one. Now he's making something else.

Sight & Sound is the place to go if you want the critical frame for where this sits in his career. The review is worth your time.

The exchange that makes this clip worth watching happens around the 35-second mark. The interviewer, doing their job, describes the new film: paranoia, desire, moral decadence. A reasonable summary based on what was known going in.

Serra cuts it off. "No, on the contrary. That's what I thought when I started. But it turned out that's not what it is at all — because I already made that film."

This is the pivot. He's not correcting a factual error. He's describing a process. He went in with one idea, the work took him somewhere else, and now the film is the opposite of the premise. Everything you see is beautiful. It's an ideal world. Maximum happiness. No paranoia, no dark things, nothing strange, nothing latent — ni nada peligroso.

That's a remarkable thing for a filmmaker to say about their own work. Most directors, when asked about themes, reach for the darkness. Serra says he's done with that, at least for this one. The film found its own direction and he followed it.

Whether the result lives up to the claim about that final scene — that's what the festival run will answer.

There's a pattern across Serra's interviews and it's visible here too. He doesn't protect himself with vague language. He doesn't say "I hope audiences will feel" or "we're exploring themes of." He makes direct claims and moves on.

The actors are the best. The final scene is the best. The film is beautiful and positive. Take it or leave it.

And then, in the same breath, he refuses to engage with anything he can't control. Distribution? Not his problem. Where it screens? Up to someone else. He's genuinely unbothered — not as a performance, but because he's already on to the next thing.

There's something useful in that for anyone who makes things. You build it, you say what it is, and then you let go of the parts that aren't yours. He doesn't chase the reception. He just makes the next film.

San Sebastián is the right place to catch him in this mode. The festival draws this kind of filmmaker — people who have real things to say and say them fast.

A clip like this one — 71 seconds, Serra at a festival, describing a film most people haven't seen yet — is exactly the kind of video that disappears. You watch it, you want to know more about Tardes de Soledad, you want to read the Sight & Sound piece, you want to find him on MUBI. But the video gives you no way in.

That's the gap VidLink closes. The links in this article — to Serra's MUBI page, to the BFI review, to the festival — those exist because someone watched the video and identified what it was pointing at. VidLink makes that part of the video itself. The thing on screen becomes something you can act on, right there, without hunting for it afterward.

For film criticism, for festival coverage, for any video where the subject matters — that's not a small thing.