The bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, probably the best and most prominent torero in the world, allows us to reflect on the intimate experience of the bullfighter, who assumes the risk of facing the bull as a personal duty out of respect for tradition and as an aesthetic challenge. With a patient and poetic lens on bullfighting's dazzling pomp and devastating brutality, Serra gives us a view of this challenge that creates ephemeral beauty through the material and violent confrontation between human and animal. Unflinching yet reflective, Serra’s film is a monumental depiction of the persistence of the primitive in the present day while acknowledging the extraordinary skill of the man who puts his life and spiritual endurance at risk as he faces down rampaging nature.

Albert Serra (b. 1975, Banyoles) is a Catalan artist and director. He gained an international recognition with his first long feature, Honor of the Knights, a free adaptation of Don Quijote played by non-professional actors from his village. The film was presented at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in 2006. He followed up with Birdsong (2008) and Story of my Death (2013), which was inspired by Casanova’s memoirs and earned him the Golden Leopard in Locarno. The Death of Louis XIV was presented in the Official Selection of Cannes Film Festival 2016. Liberté is the cinematic recreation of his 2018 Berliner Volksbühne play of the same name, which won the Special Jury award at the 2019 Un Certain Regard selection in Cannes. In 2022 he returns to Cannes in the Official Selection in the Competition with Pacifiction.