Sixteen Moments of My Life

From Viennale

As part of his Fassbinderian drive, Albert Serra cast Ingrid Caven in his controversial stage performance of Liberté at Berlin’s Volksbühne in 2010. When he adapted it for cinema, Caven was cut out of the final edit. SEIZE MOMENTS DE MA VIE was made to make amends, and may appear to be a straightforward concert film. But all the elements were staged by Serra, starting with the album Heidschi Bumbeidschi, 16 moments de ma vie—a collaboration between Caven and the band Molforts led by Marc Verdaguer, composer of the music for Serra’s films. The Catalan director then organized a theatrically lit, experimental cabaret show at Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, where he filmed the then-86-year-old Caven moving through the autobiographical album. Caven inimitably sings of her early years in Saarbrücken, her wartime experiences, cinema, psychoanalysis and more, bathed in red light and shadows, accompanied by Molforts’ mysterious post-rock; the crowd is vocal, but never seen. A companion piece to TARDES DE SOLEDAD (2024) in how it concentrates on a performer at her artistic work, it’s Serra at his most Lynchian, and may as well be an extended Roadhouse performance in Twin Peaks: The Return. (Mark Peranson)