‘Sixteen Moments of My Life’ Locarno Review: Ingrid Caven Turns Memory into Drama in Albert Serra’s Concert Film

Actress, singer and emblematic diva of the New German Cinema Ingrid Caven takes center stage in a film entirely devoted to her, directed by none other than one of contemporary cinema’s major auteurs: the Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra. In a gesture not unlike what Pedro Costa did with Jeanne Balibar in Ne change rien, the concert-film Seize moments de ma vie does exactly what its title suggests: it translates into images and sound a live performance the veteran actress and chanteuse gave in Paris in early 2025.

Backed by the band Molforts—regular Serra collaborators—Caven is filmed from an intimate proximity. The director of Pacifiction keeps the camera trained on her face, her gestures, her movements, occasionally drifting toward the musicians, but almost never toward the audience, who remain off-screen save for one brief, carefully chosen moment. Bathed in shades of red, built around constant dramatic crescendos, and blending the theatricality of a traditional cabaret singer with the more ambient, almost experimental textures of the band, the show unfolds like a fragmented narrative of her life through the songs’ lyrics.

After taking the stage and briefly grappling with minor vocal issues—she seems affected by a cough—Caven moves through a repertoire that touches on war, childhood, youth and love. Other pieces—some partly in Latin, others inspired by Goethe, Verdi or Mallarmé—push her performance toward increasing dramatic intensity. The degree to which one connects with the film will inevitably depend on their taste for Caven’s musical style, but there’s no question that Serra surrounds the diva with a singular atmosphere: intimate, heightened, and tinged with a kind of operatic melancholy.

It’s true that Serra and Caven —who acted in many Rainer W. Fassbinder films, such as Love Is Colder Than Death, Gods of the Plague, The Merchant of Four Seasons, Fox and His Friends ), Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) and Satan’s Brew (1976)— structure the show according to the conceit announced in the title, charting sixteen “moments” she considers significant in her life. But this is far from a straightforward autobiographical document; it is instead something more stylized, poetic and emotionally distilled.

Serra films her with evident affection and reverence, while Caven draws on her formidable talent to turn each song into a compact, intensely lived dramatic vignette. There are no interviews, only a brief farewell from the band at the end, almost no presence of the audience, and the lingering sensation is that of having stepped into a cabaret from another era—somewhere in Germany, more than half a century ago or more. Molforts provide a sonic foundation unlike anything typically associated with that tradition—something closer to a mysterious, post-rock soundscape—and together they transform the diva’s performance into an experience that feels at once classical and contemporary. History and present, intertwined.