Albert Serra: Liberté

The Eye Filmmuseum presents the first exhibition in the Netherlands dedicated to the work of the Catalan film and theater director Albert Serra.

Eye Filmmuseum inaugurates the first exhibition in the Netherlands showcasing the works of Catalan film and theater director Albert Serra (born in Banyoles in 1975). Serra transforms the exhibition space into an immersive stage filled with nocturnal and clandestine encounters, blending theater, film, and exhibition. This installation is inspired by Liberté, a play on libertines that Serra originally staged at the Volksbühne in Berlin in 2018 and later adapted into a film.

The piece features a group of French aristocrats who, after fleeing the court of Louis XVI, seek out fellow Prussians in a forest glade to share their libertine ideals in the style of the Marquis de Sade. As the moon rises, the freethinkers explore the forest in search of sexual encounters, blurring the boundaries between social levels and bodies. The installation evokes a world full of psychological and moral ambiguity. According to Serra, only in this gray area between right and wrong can the contradictions and hypocrisies of our time be understood. In the middle of the night, when people exchange rationality for hedonism, Liberté poses the question: how much self-control are we willing to give up in order to be completely free?

Albert Serra is known for his subversive films that question and challenge the status quo. The artist has made numerous feature films, short films, video installations and theatrical productions. His debut film Honor de cavalleria ( 2006) was selected by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the ten best films of 2007. He won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013 for Història de la meva mort (2013) and received the Jean Vigo Award in 2016 for La mort de Louis XIV ( 2016).

Liberté received the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 and Pacifiction (2022), his most recent feature, was selected for the Palme d’Or competition at Cannes in 2022. The common denominator of his pieces is provocation and absurdity, which he employs with the aim of making society look critically at itself.

Lectures and film screenings will be held during the exhibition months. Alongside Serra’s feature films, a selection of his short films will be shown. These screenings will include a diverse collection of films, some on 35mm from the Eye collection, which are significant to him and share a subtle contradiction in form or content. Albert Serra and Artur Tort, the director’s regular cameraman, will visit the museum to conduct master classes during the exhibition period.