Albert Serra was born in 1975, in Banyoles, Spain. He moved to Barcelona in order to study Hispanic Philology, Theory Of Literature and Art History. In 2003, Serra directed his first film, CRESPIÀ, THE FILM NOT THE VILLAGE, followed by several feature films like HONOR OF THE KNIGHTS (2006), BIRDSONG (2008) or STORY OF MY DEATH (2013), works that earned him appearances and awards at Cannes, in Torino or at the Viennale, obtaining for the later film the top prize of Locarno, the Golden Leopard. Serra has forged an authentic cinema of his own, leaning on a radical way to create adaptations produced by virtue of reimagining the canonical texts of world literature through a demystification whose design is to rescue the humanity of the characters, who would, otherwise, find themselves sunk in a sea of meanings imprisoned in time. Serra wants to save the possibility of a current and not archaeological relationship with such figures, creating new universes that refuse the spell of old reverence in order to reveal latent poetic senses in a minimal clearance without constraints, and seeking to transform the simplicity of the narrative elements at its disposal in vividly sensorial and oneiric worlds.
By creating an imaginary that exhorts the power of the incantatory fascination in the contemplation of the shimmering beauty of the crossing of the lights and shadows, the transparencies and opacities, Serra preserves the astonishing delicacy of the presence of people and landscapes that he films in both physical and metaphysical wanderings that release the senses of the myth’s core, composing a singular work in the contemporary cinema.