Albert Serra: Story of My Death

Albert Serra, Story of My Death / Història de la meva mort Spain 2013, 35mm, colour, sound, 148 min

Albert Serra’s most recent film Story of My Death / Història de la meva mort is an exploration of pleasure and desire built around an imagined encounter between Casanova and Dracula. Awarded the main prize at the Lorcano Film Festival in 2013, the film is a baroque and sensual journey exploring the limits of pleasure and pain at the dawn of the age of reason. Bringing the eighteenth century vividly to life, the film is an original and anarchic take on the culture of the period, drawing on everything from Voltaire and Vivaldi to the coming revolution in France. A bejewelled Casanova, played with supreme energy and childish abandon by Vicenç Altaió is a verbose connoisseur of food and sex indulging both in his passion for words and all things carnal. He finds his counterpart in a mystical vampiric figure played by Eliseu Huertas who lures peasants to his secluded castle anticipating the horrors at the heart of European history. These two charismatic outsiders are brought into collision, united by their rejection of Christian belief, one a rationalist driven by his worldly passions and the other a mystical Romantic driven by violence. As Serra has stated ‘I wanted to make a film about the night, and what happens in the night, when real desires appear.’