On one of the busiest days of the Gijón International Film Festival, Lisandro Alonso—honored with the FICX Lifetime Achievement Award—brought La libertad, his 2001 debut, back to the screen before a packed Teatro Jovellanos. The audience, made up of cinephiles of all ages, attended the screening of the minimalist portrait of Misael, that solitary woodcutter lost in the vastness of the Pampas who would forever mark the creative identity of the Argentine director. “It’s a mirror of the youth of my country,” Alonso confessed at the end of the screening, still surprised, he said, by the emotional resonance of a film he shot “when I didn’t really know yet what it meant to direct.”
The screening was only the prelude to a long, relaxed, and at times fiery conversation that he shared with Albert Serra and critic Roger Koza. There, the two filmmakers—whose paths differ but whose radicalism converges—reflected on their beginnings and on the current state of contemporary cinema. Serra summed it up this way: “Starting with a feature frees you from a lot of problems, it takes away the pressure of short films, and lets you enjoy what you’re doing much more.” Alonso agreed, adding that this initial, almost naïve freedom defined that first cinematic gesture, which he is now revisiting through a sequel in progress.
The talk, recorded as part of Koza’s podcast at the Toma 3 space, was shaped by the evident rapport between the directors, whom the critic described as having “written the history of contemporary cinema through their uncompromising vision.” The starting point was the filmed correspondence they exchanged years ago: a 22-minute visual letter from Alonso and a two-and-a-half-hour response in Catalan from Serra. “It was a neo-playful moment in my life,” the Argentine recalled, explaining that the project, undertaken after Liverpool, marked a turning point for him. “I felt a bit tired of using the same tools over and over… It was a leap—not into the void, but a leap toward trying things that weren’t on my radar.” That leap led him to new collaborations, such as with poet Fabián Casas, and to working with actors like Viggo Mortensen in Jauja and Eureka.
Serra defended such experiments as laboratories of freedom: “These projects without the pressure of fiction filmmaking allow you to try things… On a fiction set everything is more tense: less time, more money, everything becomes more complicated.” The conversation then moved to a stark contrast in their working methods. Serra shoots digitally and amasses an enormous volume of material—“400 hours of footage to reduce it to two,” he admitted—then works toward what he calls a “purification.” Alonso, by contrast, shoots on 35 mm guided by an ethic of scarcity: “My latest film is an hour and ten minutes long, and I ended up with barely three hours of raw material… That’s all.” Laughing, he joked: “If I were Albert’s producer, and he came in with 400 hours just to throw out 398, I’d fire him on the spot.”
Despite the joke, both agreed on one point: each method is valid only if it leads the director to the essence of the film. “It’s not about choosing between excess and austerity, but about finding the format that takes you to the best possible version of the film you want to make,” Alonso concluded.
The discussion grew more heated when they turned to the current state of the industry. Alonso warned of a system that, in his view, has become hostile to freer forms of filmmaking: “Today, for a film to exist, it has to cost more than a million and a half dollars.” He also criticized the bureaucracy surrounding grants: “To apply, the script has to be at least 60 pages… even if your kind of cinema doesn’t work that way.” Serra introduced a concept that stirred murmurs in the audience: “production value.” “It’s a learned castration,” he declared. “Young filmmakers are literally taught that a film must look a certain way. Festivals are increasingly rejecting films that don’t fit that value system.” For him, the loss of rigor and the growing dominance of producers in the creative ecosystem have led to a dangerous inversion: “Producers are smarter than the directors they hire… and they also hire technicians who understand much more about film than the director.”
One of the most unexpected moments came from a recent anecdote Serra shared, having just returned from Rome, where he participated in the event The Pope Meets Cinema. He was the only Spanish guest and claimed that the papal speech—though he doubted the Pope himself wrote it—was “masterful.” According to Serra, the text defended the movie theater “as the last space of freedom, of poetry, of beauty” in the face of real-estate pressure, criticized streaming for being “didactic” and “servile,” and addressed the essential difference between representing violence and exploiting it. “That speech understood cinema better than 95% of the directors in the world,” he asserted with conviction.
The closing of the conversation was as intimate as it was symbolic. Koza asked about the famous final shot of La libertad, in which Misael looks directly at the camera with a gentle smile. That gesture returns in Alonso’s new film, a continuation of the original. Alonso admitted it was no coincidence: “It’s a shot that reconnects me with the same person I filmed 25 years ago… and I think it gains immense value.”
Thus, in a day that blended memory, critique, and celebration, FICX reaffirmed the singular influence of Lisandro Alonso, a filmmaker whose work—Koza concluded—“remains difficult to imitate and essential to auteur cinema.”
