“I will not shoot a film about a concert. I don’t give a shit about a concert.”

So was Sixteen Moments of My Life (2026), a film about a concert, introduced by its director, Albert Serra, ahead of its world premiere at Locarno.

The film is the Catalan director’s second documentary in a row following the rapturously received Afternoons of Solitude (2024), about the Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. Despite Serra’s oft-voiced disdain for the genre—“Everyone knows that making a fiction is more interesting and better than making a documentary,” he told a DocsBarcelona crowd in 2024—he was obliged to return to nonfiction to shoot a performance by the 88-year-old German New Wave actress and singer, Ingrid Caven, at Théatre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Serra and Caven first met in 2018, when she appeared in his theatrical production Liberté, but her scenes were cut from the 2019 filmed version, causing her to stop speaking to him for more than a year. In a rare moment of humility for the director, Sixteen Moments is his way of making amends.

The film begins with Caven’s entrance to the stage and concludes with her final bow, with all inter-song chatter left on the cutting room floor. The setlist consists of her full 2025 autobiographical album, Heidschi Bumbeidschi, which was cowritten with Serra and Molforts, the ensemble of musicians who have been his collaborators since Honor of the Knights (2006). Caven sings about her childhood during the Second World War in Germany, her decade as a starlet of the German New Wave, and later years spent as the primary muse of Yves Saint Laurent, who once tailored a black satin dress directly onto her body for a performance at Cabaret Le Pigall’s in Paris. The lyrics are abstract and poetic, with time-, person-, and place-identifying details deployed sparingly, and the small band’s accompaniment—four members playing a mix of keys, synths, sequencers, and percussion—is similarly melodically judicious, opting for a drone-heavy sense of atmosphere. Serra heavily favors long shots of the individual players, as opposed to wide shots of the whole band, and the audience is excluded entirely.

When I spoke with Serra about the film, he amended his remarks from his introduction at the Locarno premiere, adding: “I will not just shoot a film about a concert. I need to be part of the creation of the moment.” This slight capitulation makes way for Sixteen Moments, the product of years of collaboration between Caven, the director, and Molforts. He aimed to push Caven’s cabaret stylings into something approaching late Scott Walker, with lyrics less sung than intoned and musical accompaniment constructing a mood of slow and violent dread. In Serra’s world, of course, collaboration means something almost unrecognizable compared to its usual definition. He refers to this again and again as his preference for “noncommunication.” His actors don’t get to read the full scripts of his fiction films. For Sixteen Moments, the songs were composed via voice notes (in Caven’s case, burning her recordings to CDs) from separate geographic locations, each musician responding to the next in near-total isolation.

As a general principle, this creative solitude extends to the construction of the films. Serra prefers to set his players and technicians in motion without instruction, with the notion that their uncertainty and anxiety leads to greater concentration. “I am like a medium,” he told me. “I stay separate.” For Afternoons of Solitude and Pacifiction (2022), his most recent fiction film, he shot every scene with three cameras; on Sixteen Moments he increased this number to five. The idea is that individual camera operators are free to concentrate on discrete moments without obligation to coverage, and Serra can reconstruct the scene in post. Ideally, left to observe what they will, the operators will discover images “not visible to the human eye,” Serra told me. “Still,” Serra has said, “there are two moments when not one camera was doing something useful. Not one.”

When pressed on Sixteen Moments, Serra’s mind tends to wander to Afternoons of Solitude. I asked him how he conceives the place of his documentaries in his oeuvre, next to the fiction films he has prized. “I think the torero film [Afternoons of Solitude] is a true documentary,” he responds, not missing a beat nor seeming too concerned about the implications of that remark for the documentary he is currently touring. “It’s really challenging, in little aspects but in a decisive way. Especially morally,” he continued. There is something inherently provocative about a film about bullfighting made with Serra’s unblinking concentration, testing the effects of looking closely at something meant to be seen only from a distance, and this provocation is mostly absent from the new film. Afternoons of Solitude contains several images that will be imprinted on my eyelids until my dying day; just days after the premiere, Sixteen Moments begins to blur with a thousand other concert films in my mind.

The closest thing to another concert film in Serra’s filmography is Cubalibre (2014), an 18-minute short named after a drink ordered in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971). That film’s simple execution intercuts lusty karaoke performances from a few singers (performing atop Molforts’ music) with shots of two men sharing a drink in the audience. Caven being a longtime Fassbinder collaborator (and, for a short time, his wife), there would seem to be an additional layer of connection between these musical homages. “I don’t like any of the shorts,” Serra said, dismissing the inquiry. “[Cubalibre] was a commission for a restaurant near my house. They asked me to do it, and I did it because they are friends. Because they are friends, they paid me a meal. I will never make a short in my life of my own initiative.” Sixteen Moments also originated, more or less, as a favor for a friend, so at least some connection persists.

Rebuffed, I thought to navigate to a safe subject: Fassbinder himself. This was perhaps naïve, given Serra’s vexed relationship to the West German wunderkind over the years. In the production diary for The Three Little Pigs (2012), for which he included hours of interviews with Fassbinder, he reflected at length on this paradoxical disinterest, writing:

I simply don’t respect Fassbinder, he doesn’t appeal to me, I don’t regard him as important. To a large extent, I don’t know his filmography as a director (he is a mediocre one, although he’s a brilliant actor) nor do I know about his life (I can barely recall the more off-colour details of it) or about his opinions; I don’t even feel any affinity with his baroque, decorativist and circumstantial aesthetic.

This is difficult to square with the enchanting Cubalibre, which sketches a clean line between Serra’s own minimalism and Fassbinder’s “baroque, decorativist and circumstantial” mise-en-scène, but it makes a certain amount of sense given Serra’s insistence on isolation. If every participant and every image must exist in solitude, so too must the director be alone in film history.

He responded to the Fassbinder line of questioning with an anecdote about his Catalonian countryman Salvador Dalí. In the story, Dalí had a friend asking him for money. Though Dalí said no, the friend insisted, day after day complaining of his tragic financial situation. One day Dalí was going upstairs to his studio, when the friend asked him again for money. Leaping onto the table between us, Serra concluded this story with a pantomime of Dalí kicking his friend in the chest, sending him flying down the stairs.

“Don’t you say I’m God?” Serra yelled, imitating Dali. “God receives homage!”

The force of Serra’s misdirection perhaps owes to an unwillingness to acknowledge the way his presence is mostly effaced from Sixteen Moments, his insistence on novelty bearing an inverse relationship to the relative familiarity of this film. The cultivated separation and concentration at work here do not, as in Afternoons of Solitude, make way for unforeseen sights and sensations. Rather, the work seems entirely beholden to Caven’s performance, made to fit her like Saint Laurent’s black dress. The long takes of Sixteen Moments often conjure a certain hypnotic mystique, and yet these moments seem totally in tune with the dramatic rises in the music, the director seeming to set himself aside in order to serve the performance.

As a performer, Caven can still be spellbinding, her age having lent a certain gravity to her falsetto, which occasionally breaks. She paces the stage, only rarely sharing a frame with her bandmates. Her first songs cover life in Germany during wartime, beginning with a sensory portrait of a famous episode from Caven’s early life, when, at four years old, she sang “Silent Night” for her father’s Nazi battalion. She holds the microphone and the camera’s attention in a vice grip, her eyes closed under moody red and blue lights. Serra takes his time before showing the other band members, cutting to a shot of the whole stage only after several minutes. There’s an undeniable concentration, as Serra says, to certain of these long takes of Caven. A later track recalling her 1970s finds Caven repeating “another bar, another cinema, another bar, another cinema…” as her voice begins to falter. Serra’s restraint in the editing booth facilitates immersion in a difficult moment that might otherwise be melodically uninviting. Seduced by the parts of her biography that I knew well, I was struck by their relatively minor status amid the totality of the life being disclosed. I gasped when Caven, singing of the cows watching her from the Bavarian mountains, began to shout, “Moo! Moo! Moo! Moo!” Such are the fruits of Serra’s approach applied to the concert film: that we might pay a closer kind of attention.

“Who gives a shit about the audience?” Serra asks me, and indeed, the spectators are absent from Sixteen Moments. “They are not mentally well. They are not capable of concentrating. It’s really damaging to try to make something that pleases people like this.” The intensity of his gaze seems a direct counter to the distractions of modern life, which he frequently disparages, allowing Caven to communicate with an audience on her own terms.

Serra is far from the first to be moved to portraiture of Caven. In 2024, Fireflies Press, in collaboration with FIDMarseille, released a collection of essays and interviews, Ingrid Caven: I Am a Fiction, for which Serra spoke with the author (and Caven’s partner) Jean-Jacques Schuhl, winner of the 2000 Prix Goncourt for his experimental novel Ingrid Caven. In the same collection, Bertrand Bonello recalls his own experience shooting a different Caven concert film, Ingrid Caven: Voice and Music (2012), and Erika Balsom writes of the tension between Caven’s irreducible presence and her frequent relegation to cameo parts: “Lurking on the margins yet claiming attention, she is the opposite of an actress who disappears into her role.” With Sixteen Moments, Serra steps into a humble position, contributing a late and most probably minor entry into a rich lineage of works about Caven, while restoring her position from the margins to the fore. It’s a fundamentally sweet gesture, though he would never admit to such sentimentality.

When I asked about his apparent regard for his subject, the most I could get Serra to admit to was this: “I did it, first of all, because she is old, so I respect that. Second, because I like her. She is intelligent. I know if I go to dinner with Ingrid, it will be fun because of Ingrid.” By a margin of several minutes, this was the most concise answer given by Serra in our interview, perhaps cut short for veering too close to the humility underlying Sixteen Moments of My Life.