On May 3 of last year, the Ministry of Culture announced that it would eliminate the National Tauromaquia Award, which until then was equipped with 30,000 euros, a figure that equated the bulls to the rest of the disciplines such as cinema, theater or literature. The department directed by Ernest Urtasun showed his anti -urine convictions and did not summon the award by 2024 in addition to initiating the administrative procedures for his final cancellation.
Urtasun confirmed thus what he had already stated when he was Eurodiput. In 2016, he declared that “animal torture cannot be considered culture,” and consequently, when he had the culture portfolio in his possession, he decided that it was. Although assistance to bulls has been in decline for years, they have always been a cultural war between right and left.
The announcement of Urtasun enquista that battle. If it was already normal to see Isabel Díaz Ayuso Oa Victoria Federica de Marichalar and Bourbon going to the bulls, establishing a thread that linked the most conservative sector with the squares; After the elimination of the prize, discordant barons of the PSOE joined the Pro Taurino side, with Emiliano García Page at the head. The president of Castilla-La Mancha wipted again the eye to the right and joined them in the call of an alternative national prize that would be delivered in the Senate.
In the midst of all this cultural war, the San Sebastián Film Festival announced that it included at the competition for the Golden Concha the documentary that the Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra had shot, precisely, on the bulls. There is no zinemaldia without its controversy, and this time the bulls showed that the debate was open becoming the theme of a film festival, where an element like bullfighting does not usually appear or far away.
It was not any film that addressed the matter, but Soledad afternoons It was the new film of one of the most personal and radical authors of Spanish cinema. A Enter terrible That, until that moment, he had been claimed more in France, where he is a usual name of the Cannes Festival and where he had opted for the César Awards for his previous film Pacification In Spain, however, its name is still unknown to a large part of the public.
Pacma asked to retire the film from the competition, Urtasun was not in the projection – the minister only attended the first weekend and the film was projected later – and the director of the festival, José Luis Rebordinos – explained to deal with controversies as they are – asked that people see the film before commenting and even invited the members of the animalist party to a pass.
The film thus became the best kept and most desired mystery of the festival. After the first press pass, that feeling was enlarged. The criticisms were unanimous. Albert Serra confirmed that he was a prodigious filmmaker, capable of offering a look without moralism, but sharp as a knife. Soledad afternoons, As always in his cinema, he supposed to bring his eye to a peephole to observe what nobody wants to see. As much as it refuses, animal torture continues to exist in a public square in front of thousands of people, and its film tried to show what was happening inside – and outside, in the bambalins of the gang – so that this tradition continued to maintain.
Honesty is the key. ‘Solitude afternoons’ does not refuse anything. In the same way that intimacy is shown there are other planes that show the violence of bullfighting
Albert Serra
– Filmmaker
What nobody expected is that positive criticisms were transverse. And here the great success of Serra was revealed. His camera captured everything so that the viewer decoded it. The bullfights saw in her a praise of honor, of courage. An exalting of the confrontation between the bullfighter and the death that exalted the beauty of his typism. The Antitaurinos saw such a wild and violent portrait that placed bulls as something indefensible. One that gave the foreground of the film to the living bull, which taught the butcher shop to which they punish him and that, in a narrative finding more typical of fiction than of the documentary, found a comic and ridiculous relief in the ball of the bullfighter of the King Roca, an absolute protagonist of a film that, in addition, underlined the homoerotic component of the bullfighting with a medium master scene An episode of Rupaul.
The jury, chaired by the Spanish director Jaione Camborda, corroborated all that and gave him the Golden Concha highlighting “his artistic power” and “her cinematographic language that gives space to the viewer to judge.” “We believe in the power of art to generate movement, and this work allows us to reflect on the limits of artistic expression, fear, brutality or masculinity, among other aspects,” added the author of O’Corno “Space to judge.” It may seem like a common place, but there lies the key to the reactions to Soledad afternoonsbut also of Serra’s cinema, which does not give everything massive, that does not give sermons. A cinema whose images always have a mystery that the viewer must decipher.
To all this, Albert Serra, who until then had enjoyed giving hyperbolic headlines, appeared in San Sebastián more calm than usual. He did it alone. No one from the gang or rock king accompanied him in the promotion; Nor have they done it in the promotional events of presentation of the film. He defended his film from the controversy, and of course he had to answer the question of where he was placed in the cultural war of bullfighting. Serra, like his cinema, does not seek to answer anyone, and from the first moment he made it clear that he was more bullfighting than Antitaurino.
“I am not against. I prefer that there is no doubt, without any doubt, ”he answered eldiario.es without remilgos, but adding that this position was sterile and that he did skinny favor to his film proposal. “This type of attitude is useless. On the contrary. To make a movie and above all a documentary film, the beautiful is precisely to put yourself in this state of innocence, in this search position, that the camera looks for unpublished things, things that surprise yourself, things that you could not find in any other way. And, above all, things that human eyes have never seen. That’s what is what. If not, it would be very boring. If not, you already have the retransmissions of TV for that, ”he added.
For him his moral position was summed up in a word: “honesty.” And there he believed that the success of Soledad afternoons Among the entire ideological arch. “I never consider what people will see in my movie, but I think honesty is the key. Soledad afternoons He does not refuse anything. In the same way that intimacy is shown, there are other planes that show the violence of bullfighting. There is everything. In that balance you can find everyone, ”said Serra about that transversality. He stressed that he had not married anyone even though it was “a controversial and thorny issue.” If I had thought about content the bullfighter, “it would be a publirreporta of his best run of the year” and, on the contrary, he could have been much more wild. “If you listen to people, you would never end up,” he settled in San Sebastián.
What nobody thought was going to happen was that the most unbeaten filmmaker, the most radical, was going to be the object of desire of all. And that I was going to do it with a movie about bulls. Both right and left have wanted to appropriate Soledad afternoons (and Serra). The film is the golden fleece of this cultural war. You just have to look at what happened after the Golden shell in San Sebastián. Albert Serra has starred in a cover of Vanity Fair, which he had never achieved with any of his other films; The highest grossing of all of them barely exceeded 20,000 spectators. He has given colloquiums at the Film Academy, and in all sacred places for cinephilia.
At the same time, the newspaper El Mundo recovered its forgotten Bullfighting Prize only to give it to Albert Serra, while the newly created and alternative National Prize that does not depend on the Ministry of Culture, but on the Senate and nine autonomous communities has also fallen to the filmmaker. How many times did the conservative sector awarded a film director? How many times did the world of cinema have claimed a film about bullfighting?
And there arises a doubt, one that affects a director who had built his career and his image around a figure of rebellion, of challenge to power and everything. If Albert Serra like everyone, will not mean that he has domesticated?: “I have thought about it. I have thought about it a little. Not much, but I don’t know. Probably. Let’s wait for the next one to put it, that it goes on Russia and promises. ”
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