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Albert Serra films the life of Ingrid Caven through music
Seize moments de ma vie recovers in the form of an experimental cinematographic portrait sixteen autobiographical songs of the German artist during a concert at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.
Albert Serra returns to the San Sebastian Festival with Seize moments de ma vie , a new cinematic exercise that is far from narrative conventions and that stars Ingrid Caven, a German singer and actress linked to some of the most unique episodes of European cinema and culture in the sixties and seventies. The filmmaker from Banyoles, born in 1975, constructs a portrait that does not seek to explain a biography in a conventional way, but rather to approach the figure of Caven through music, stage presence and memory.
The starting point is a concert held at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, where Caven performs a repertoire made up of sixteen autobiographical songs. Each piece refers to a moment in her life and allows Serra to construct a kind of fragmentary self-portrait in which voice, gesture and time acquire as much importance as any strictly narrative element. The German artist, now in her 80s, thus becomes the center of a proposal that observes the passage of time without the need to turn it into a chronological story.
The film features the participation of Ingrid Caven, Marc Verdaguer, Ferran Font and Enric Juncà, while the music incorporates the work of Ferran Font, Enric Juncà, Joe Robinson and Marc Verdaguer. The photography is by Artur Tort, responsible for giving visual form to a device that moves between documentary, performance recording and cinematic experimentation.
Instead of placing Caven in front of a camera intended to reconstruct her career, Serra lets the songs articulate the story. The concert becomes a space of memory and music, a way of accessing an artistic personality marked by her relationship with cinema, theatre and the European avant-garde. The result is a piece that seems less interested in explaining who Ingrid Caven is than in observing what remains of a life when it is evoked through performance.
The proposal thus maintains some of the constants of Serra's cinema: the interest in figures that transcend conventional categories, the tension between reality and representation, and a particular conception of cinematic time. The director does not seek to speed up the story, but rather to allow the scenic moments to breathe and for Caven's personality to emerge progressively through his voice and presence.
Serra's relationship with the San Sebastian Festival adds a new layer to this premiere. The Catalan filmmaker won the Concha de Oro there with Tardes de soledad , a work that generated a wide debate about his perspective on the world of bullfighting and which later gave way to Los domingos as the winner of the festival's highest award. Now, Serra returns to the San Sebastian program with a work of a very different nature, but equally far removed from the more predictable mechanisms of conventional cinema.
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