"Director: Albert Serra"

• The Death of Louis VXI | DVD | (20/11/2017) from £7.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  August 1715. After going for a walk, Louis XIV feels a pain in his leg. The next day, the king keeps fulfilling his duties and obligations, but his sleep is troubled and he has a serious fever. He barely eats and weakens increasingly. This is the start of the slow agony of the greatest King of France death from gangrene, surrounded by his doctors and closest advisors, speaking in frantic, whispered tones about their options, in an era in which little is known of such illnesses. Albert Serra's new film, The Death of Louis XIV, is an adaptation of the Duc de Saint-Simon's memoirs, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as the Sun-King. The cult actor, who worked with all major directors from the Nouvelle Vague after being discovered in Truffaut's The 400 Blows, plays the dying king who can barely move from his bed in the Château de Versailles. His relatives and his closest counsellors come in turns at his bedside, but he attends only a few meetings and can barely rule his kingdom. His secret wife Madame de Maintenon, and his doctor Fagon dread his last breath and try to hide it from the public, to preserve the future of France. Shot in rich colour with extraordinary lighting, Jean-Pierre Léaud, in his costume, hair and poses, fully embodies the last few days of the longest serving king of France, who, with his seventy two years in power, changed the face of the monarchy and of France.

• Story of My Death (Història de la meva mort) | DVD | (29/06/2015) from £14.49   |  Saving you £-1.50 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Award-winning Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra has established himself as one of the most original and iconoclastic voices in contemporary cinema. His deliciously eccentric film The Story of My Death (winner of the prestigious Golden Leopard prize at the 2013 Locarno Film Festival) imagines a meeting between the ageing Casanova and Count Dracula to chart the collision between the eighteenth century of Enlightenment rationalism and libertine sensuality and a nineteenth century founded upon Romanticism obscurantism and violence.

• Honour Of The Knights | DVD | (26/03/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  There are no windmills only wind-and trees and grass and sunlight extinguishing the dawn-in writer-director Albert Serra's extraordinary minimalist/naturalist take on the Don Quixote story. Honour Of The Knights takes inspiration not just from Cervantes but also from an exhaustive litany of other literary and cinematic sources. It is most affecting however as a spare yet soulful study of two lone figures against an unspoiled landscape-the last refuge perhaps from a world that no longer resembles a bygone golden age of peace and prosperity. There is a whistful air to the film as the frail weather-beaten Quixote (Llu''-s Carb'') trudges forth in the company of the loyal Sancho (Llu''-s Serrat) pausing periodically to rest bask in a gentle stream or impart some terse morsel of wisdom.