El Cant dels ocells

For his second feature film, Albert Serra was inspired by a traditional Catalan Christmas carol, "El cant dels ocells". In luminous black and white, he tells the biblical legend of the Three Kings, who follow the "Magi" to find the newborn baby Jesus. He focuses on their journey, which takes on epic proportions. Shot partly in the mountains of Iceland, partly inland in the Canary Islands, the film balances the classical and the profane, as Serra focuses on the paradoxical moments before the birth of Christianity, a time when the Three Kings are just three men looking for something to follow. "Less a retelling of the Nativity story than a dream about it, filtered... through a sensibility that recalls Luis Buñuel and Samuel Beckett." – A. O. Scott, The New York Times