Award-winning bullfighting documentary likely to anger aficionados and abolitionists alike

Every year the Spanish ministry of culture awards prizes for different artistic disciplines. From next year onwards, the country’s national bullfighting award will be withdrawn. The current Spanish minister of culture, the Barcelona-born Green politician Ernest Urtasun, supports the prohibition of what has long been known as Spain’s “national fiesta”.

At the awards ceremony held at the Reina Sofia Museum last week, the minister refused to applaud this year’s winner for “sustained excellence in bullfighting”, Julián López El Juli, the recently retired Madrid-born matador. El Juli retorted to the slight by holding out his hand and publicly calling out the minister’s lack of respect as evidence that he was unfit to hold office.

Bullfighting predates football as a form of mass entertainment, and has been a source of inspiration for artists and intellectuals for centuries. It still has its followers in the present day, but young urban Spaniards are increasingly sensitive to the undeniable cruelty involved. Bullfighting was banned in Catalonia in 2011. Bullfights, known as corridas, are still staged in much of the rest of Spain, but it can be career suicide for artists, politicians or intellectuals to be associated with them.

So I, like many in Spain and the Basque Country, didn’t expect the jury of the 72nd San Sebastian Film Festival to award its highest accolade, the Concha de Oro (Golden Shell), to a bullfighting documentary. The director of Tardes de Soledad (Afternoons of Solitude) is Albert Serra, an iconoclastic filmmaker from Gerona, a fiercely pro-independence province of Catalonia.

For five years, Serra and his crew have been following the exploits of two rising stars with the ambition to become figuras, the term for that handful of elite matadors like El Juli, who appear on the most lucrative and prestigious bills.

Bullfighting and the screen arts have history in and beyond Spain. During cinema’s infancy, early filmmakers the Lumière brothers filmed matadors in Madrid. At annual village fairs, Spaniards would pay to enter a tent and watch recordings of professional corridas. The Valencian Vicente Blasco Ibánez’s 1908 novel Blood and Sand has a strong claim to being the earliest literary text to be written with a future film adaptation in mind.

In 1951, Hollywood actress Ava Gardner (a close friend of Ernest Hemingway, author of bullfighting novel Death in the Afternoon) starred alongside Catalan matador Mario Cabré in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, which featured corridas in Gerona (the city’s bullring was demolished in 2006). Spanish television started broadcasting bullfights in 1956. Nearly 70 years later, Movistar Spain shut down its dedicated bullfighting channel in March 2023.

Oscar-winning writer and director Pedro Almodóvar – who received a lifetime achievement award at San Sebastian this year – has his Madrid offices close to the world’s premiere bullring, Las Ventas. In 1986 he portrayed the world of bullfighting in Matador, starring a very young Antonio Banderas, later returning to the subject in Talk to Her (2002).

This film, which won Almodovar the Oscar for best screenplay, contains scenes in which a female matador is gored in the picturesque bullring in Aranjuez. The British Board of Film Censorship insisted on cuts, and Almodóvar faced legal challenges from animal rights groups. According to Spanish law, corridas are permitted and can be filmed. The legal situation becomes thornier if a bull is killed by a professional matador for the sole purposes of the event being captured on film.

Documenting the glory and the horror

Nothing is staged for Serra’s documentary. He followed the Peruvian Andrés Roca Rey, a box-office phenomenon often dismissed by serious aficionados as a crass populist; and the more refined Pablo Aguado, a native of Seville.

Serra connected better with Roca Rey, capturing his fears and solitude in an often hostile professional environment. Pay-for-view television channel Canal+ set a new gold standard for broadcasting bullfights with technical panache. Serra makes no attempt to replicate this labour. Placing the camera at the eye level of the bull and the matador results in a far more graphic and gruesome spectacle.

The Catalan filmmaker is amongst world cinema’s masters of sound design, and the audience is privy to the bull’s breathing as well as conversations between the matador and his team once the afternoon’s activities in the sand have come to a bloody conclusion.

Tardes de Soledad is likely to anger and unnerve aficionados and abolitionists alike. Industrial farming is arguably crueller than bullfighting, but recognising this fact is not automatically a defence of the “national fiesta”. It might just be that any hypothetical prohibition needs to framed alongside a wider reassessment of our relationship with, and responsibility to, non-human creatures.

Some abolitionists suggest that, even though bulls are sold for meat afterwards, it is death and torture being employed for entertainment that renders corridas so problematic. Psychological desensitisation is a real risk, especially when children are in attendance.

Aficionados claim bullfighting is a rare opportunity to address our own mortality in a society in which death and nature are increasingly kept at a distance. Almodóvar’s pristinely shot bullfighting scenes nevertheless show how ritualised beauty – the vivid stylised outfits, the music, the choreography and the architecture – often divert attention from the blood.

Serra’s harrowing footage might even shake some enthusiasts out of their complacency. Can so much animal and human suffering be justified in the name of an ancestral art? Conversely, Tardes de Soledad registers the poetry, pain and pathos of bullfighting in and beyond the arena. Dialogues between Roca Rey and his entourage establish a new benchmark for depicting the interior world of a matador, more unforgiving and empathetic than anything by Hemingway.

A rallying call at anti-bullfighting demonstrations is: “It’s not culture, it’s torture.” Serra’s documentary warrants the Concha de Oro for showing the terms are not mutually exclusive.

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Duncan Wheeler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.