The Three Little Pigs

Invited by dOCUMENTA13 in 2012, Albert Serra creates 'The Three Little Pigs', a 101-hour film with Goethe, Hitler and Fassbinder as protagonists. Filmed in Kassel in fragments to be projected every day during the three months dOCUMENTA lasts, it will be presented in its multi-screen installation format at Fabra i Coats: Centre d'Art.

With this cinematic experiment, Serra explores the performativity of the medium, but also the fidelity to autobiographical texts and the symbolic construction of history. Presented as a continuous flow of discourse, non-professional actors recite the words attributed to these characters in three books: 'Conversations with Goethe', by J.P. Eckermann, 'The private conversations' of Adolf Hitler and a collection of interviews with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through their dissertations, the personality and ideas of three figures who mark three key moments in German history and in the construction of Europe are drawn.

This is the premiere in Spain of 'The Three Little Pigs', which for the first time comes out of the German context thanks to the initiative of Fabra and Coats, who believed in the need to be able to show this play magna from our most international filmmaker in Catalonia. With this aim, and with the support of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Goethe Institut, Fabra i Coats has commissioned and captained the titanic task of translating and subtitling the 101 hours of film into catalan, which took nine months.

Albert Serra (Banyoles, 1975) is considered one of the most outstanding young people in contemporary cinema internationally. His production company, Andergraun Films, is considered one of the most relevant voices in European independent film production. In his works, whether film, installation, theatrical performance or performance, Serra repeatedly presents unique landscapes, historical and literary characters that fuse classicism and experimentation, as we can see in 'Honor de cavalleria' (2006), 'El cant dels ocells' (2008), 'Història de la meva mort' (2013), 'La mort de Lluís XIV' (2016) or 'Liberté' (2019). He represented Catalonia at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with 'Singularity', curated by Chus Martínez.

With the support of Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Goethe-Institut Barcelona and Consulat General de la República Federal d'Alemanya in Barcelona.