20/05/2008

Presented today in Cannes’ Directors' Fortnight, Bird Song confirmed Albert Serra’s reputation as one of Catalonia’s most radical filmmakers.

After playing around with the myth of Don Quixote in his debut feature Honour of the Knights (Quixotic) [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (shown at Cannes in 2006), the Catalan director decided to deliver a bizarre and unexpectedly hilarious portrait of the Three Wise Men in search of the baby Jesus. The story, told countless times before, gains no further details in Serra’s version, a non plot-driven film in which characters remain vague and are intentionally stripped of psychological depth.

Instead, Serra prefers to explore the pleasure of filming the three men lost in beautiful, natural settings – “lost” because unlike in the traditional version of the story, the star that will lead them to the Messiah takes a while to appear in the sky.

With very little – but quite funny – dialogue, the film recalls Serra’s previous work, as the two leads from Honour of the Knights (Lluis Carbó and Lluis Serrat Battle) here play two of the kings, while the third is played by Lluís Serrat Masanellas. Their (often silent) interactions are far from burlesque yet contribute to the film’s ironic and dry tone.

According to Serra, the film – with its long takes and shot in black and white – is a “sort of theatre of the absurd. The dialogue is there but because it doesn’t contain any dramatic information related to the film’s subject. It is there just as the landscape and the actors are there, simply because they are and not to advance the film or develop its subject”.

Surely demanding, the film divided the audience, as some accepted the challenge of the journey, while others ventured out of the venue itself.

The film was produced by Barcelona-based companies Aundergraun Films and Eddie Saeta S.A. while Nates-based Capricci Films handles international sales.