Q&As with Albert Serra on October 5 & 6

Catalan director Albert Serra’s follow-up to his magisterial The Death of Louis XIV (NYFF54) is another forensic documentation of the Sun King’s final breaths. Here, however, Versailles is replaced with the glow of the gallery. Featuring Lluís Serrat (Sancho from Serra’s Honor of the Knights) in a filmed performance of a 2017 installation, Roi Soleil boldly crossbreeds performance art and observational cinema. As we watch the King writhe and moan—sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously—in mortal agony, his prone body bathed in bloodred fluorescents, the spectator’s role is increasingly called into question, implicating the viewer in the public consumption of this very private experience.