[The following text was published in Pardo, the official daily of the Locarno Film Festival.]

After the matador portrait of Afternoons of Solitude (2024), Catalan auteur – and 2013 Pardo d’Oro winner – Albert Serra has crafted another documentary exploration of a solitary performer. Sixteen Moments of My Life (Seize moments de ma vie) is the filmed record of a 2025 memoir-concert by the German actress and singer Ingrid Caven at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Caven, who previously collaborated with Serra as a performer in the original, stage version of his film Liberté (2019), may be best known internationally for her roles in the films of her one-time husband Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but she has been a celebrated chanteuse in Paris since the late 1970s.

Accompanied by the band Molforts, frequent collaborators of Serra, the 86-year-old Caven sings of episodes from her life in French, with sporadic detours into German and English. Some of these are direct, vivid memories, like the time she was brought to a Nazi garrison as a child in Saarbrücken to sing “Silent Night”, or her first time on camera for Fassbinder. Other pieces are more cryptic – dreams, visions, Latin hymns – whose full import is perhaps accessible only to those close to her. Even so, it’s evident that they emerge from an extremely personal space.

This isn’t a traditional collection of songs. The text oscillates between prose and verse, the compositions are often arhythmic, and the numbers rather ebb and flow like memories, creating an immersive, hypnotic soundscape of voice, music and sound effects. The tone is frequently agonised and ominous, but with pockets of brightness, such as a tremendously moving account, in major key, of a young Ingrid watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) in a newly opened theatre.

The concert is a total performance of body, mind and voice. Dressed in the black satin dress that Yves Saint Laurent famously designed for her, Caven leads the show in complete freedom from convention, now going off-key or off-beat, now repeating clipped phrases. She casts her eyes downward between long pauses, seemingly trying to recall a distant memory. At one point, singing of bygone psychoanalysis sessions, she lies on the floor, as though channelling the experience through reenactment.

Wisely, Serra keeps Caven take centre-stage, cutting away only occasionally to the instrumentalists and never showing the audibly enraptured audience. This simplicity is echoed by the spare stage design, bathed in blacks and deep reds that draw us into an intimate space of attentive listening. Variously a concert movie, an actor profile, and an experimental performance piece, Sixteen Moments is a unique, syncretic showcase, as befits an artist whose work, too, straddles multiple disciplines.