With Afternoons of Solitude, Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra returns to Spain for his first documentary: a bloodsoaked portrait of celebrity bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey and the procession of bulls he slays. Captured in tight framing, Serra’s camera conjures never-before-seen proximity to a frontier of bloodsport. Outside the bullring, Roca Rey floats through limousines and empty hotel rooms: a startlingly somber, almost gentle presence. Without a glimmer of exposition or polemical critique, Afternoons of Solitude builds from an innate curiosity about violence and the seemingly irrational conquests of its practitioners who launch headfirst into the brink of death, risking all for nothing. Though Serra refutes it as a “masculine” performance, bullfighting––with its traditional costuming and theatricality––reveals itself as a strange anachronism: a specter of old values and cultures haunting modern Spain.

I spoke with Serra at the Festival de Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal. We discussed the enigma of Roca Rey,...