In the brutally entrancing documentary “Afternoons of Solitude,” the viewer sees the ritualistic bloodshed of bullfighting up close.
The movie, the first nonfiction work by the Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra, centers on the young Peruvian torero Andrés Roca Rey, who’s considered among the best in a gory field. As witnessed and edited by Serra, 50, the centuries-old deathly spectacle, in which a flamboyantly clad man makes a performance that many people deem abhorrent, takes on an otherworldly quality.
Though it only had a limited release in art-house cinemas when it came out in most countries this year, the revered French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma recently named “Afternoons of Solitude” the best film of 2025. It is now streaming on multiple platforms, including Mubi in the United States.
“We felt it was not only a great documentary about a very specific topic, but also an essay about cinema itself that interrogates our position as spectators,” said Marcos Uzal, Cahiers du Cinéma’s editor in chief.
Twelve out of 14 writers for Cahiers du Cinéma — a cinephile bible that once counted the filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut among its critics — listed “Afternoons of Solitude” as one of their favorites.
In a video interview from his studio in Bilbao, Spain, Serra said that “Afternoons of Solitude” was an “unprecedented” work, because a bullfighter of such stature as Roca Rey had never before agreed to let cameras penetrate their world with so much access. The images bring the viewer impossibly close to the action, though Serra rejected the idea that the result was “immersive.”
With multiple cameras using long lenses to shoot from a distance and therefore not intrude on the action, Serra and his team filmed several bullfights over the course of three years. They captured Roca Rey’s visceral histrionics, his decompression chats with his entourage and intimate moments as he gets dressed and prays before risking his life once again.
Roca Rey said in a text message that the movie showed “the passion, the dedication of both the animal and the bullfighter, and the truth that exists in this profession.” He added that “the bullfight is not only full of truth, dedication and danger, but also of art and beauty.”
Serra had initially considered another bullfighter, Pablo Aguado. But Roca Rey prevailed, Serra said, because he had a “special photogenic quality and is naturally mysterious, like a rock star,” qualities that contrasted with bullfighting’s conservative connotations. “On a visual level — in terms of morphology, of his face, his attitude — he broke away from this cliché,” he added.
“He portrayed the essence of bullfighting in a more graphic way, more visible to the camera,” Serra said.
While Serra has earned a reputation in cinema circles as a provocateur who makes eyebrow-raising public comments and challenging work, his face illuminated with genuine fascination for the power of his art form when he spoke about his impulse to make “Afternoons of Solitude.”
“Cinema brings you closer to life itself,” he said. “It makes us more sensitive to space and time, to what is being filmed and its duration. That’s why there are shots of a bull dying that last 50 seconds.”
Serra’s previous efforts include “Pacifiction” (also named the best film by Cahiers du Cinéma, in 2022), a look at French neocolonialism, and “The Death of Louis XIV,” a fictionalized portrait of a dying monarch. But “Afternoons of Solitude,” he thinks, could exist only as a documentary.
“You can’t recreate all the tension in fiction. It would all be impossible,” he said. “That’s why all fictional movies in the history of cinema that dealt with bullfighting are bad.”
Serra attended bullfights as a child, but then 30 years passed before he returned to the bullring. Now, he said, he sees a religious-laced, bigger-than life mentality that fuels most toreadors’ bravado.
Showing its violence in his movie was not exploitative, he added, because art allows for “the acceptance of beauty even in things that perhaps have no place in the ethical world of reality.” His interest, he said, was in trying to understand the paradox of the grotesque acts executed with such attention for poise and theatricality.
Spaniards have been drawn to the spectacle of the bullring since the 18th century, but Tommaso Koch, a journalist at El País newspaper who has reported on changing attitudes to bullfighting said that opinions were now divided. The country’s right-wing parties have turned it into an identity issue, equating its survival with the preservation of “the Spanish soul,” he said.
Left-leaning politicians often speak against it, Koch said, calling it “barbaric and something that should disappear.” In 2013, a conservative government passed legislation protecting bullfighting as intangible cultural heritage.
“Some people say, ‘Bullfighting is dying, it’s only for old people,’ but that’s not true,” Koch said. “Among those who attend, one of the biggest demographics are young people, 15 to 24 years old.”
Uzal, the Cahiers du Cinéma editor, said that there had been a backlash in France, too, when “Afternoons of Solitude” appeared on the magazine’s cover. “Some people said that simply making a film about this subject was already reprehensible, and that defending the film was even worse,” he said.
That mentality goes against the very nature of film criticism, Uzal said. Cahiers du Cinéma, he explained, has always believed that it is a director’s aesthetic decisions that are political, not just their subject matter. “That means there’s no forbidden subject,” Uzal added.
Serra said he believed that even those who vehemently oppose bullfighting could be enticed by his movie’s evocative images: He doesn’t aim to change minds or answer moral questions.
“If someone says, ‘They are psychopaths,’ or, ‘They are cruel people who abuse animals,’ I’d say, ‘But you already knew this.’ And if that’s your position, the movie also shows you that side,” he said. “It’s not hiding it from you at all.”
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