LIBERTÉ

Just before the French Revolution, in a forest outside Berlin, a band of libertines expelled from the court of Louis XVI rendezvous with the legendary German seducer and freethinker, the Duc de Walchen (Helmut Berger), to convince him to join in their mission: the rejection of authority and all moral boundaries. What begins as an evening of strategizing on the proliferation of libertinage, descends into a Sadean night of pansexual one-upmanship.

Liberté is a singular cinematic experience only Albert Serra could deliver, a film in which increasingly dramatic acts of pain and pleasure unfold in counterpoint to cinematographer Artur Tort’s luminous images of moonlit sylvan spaces. As Serra and his committed team of regular performers and newcomers "open the gates of Hell" and explore the limits of the erotic imagination, you won’t be able to look away.

2020  Cinema Studies 

Winner - Special Jury Prize - Cannes Film Festival

Official Selection - Toronto Film Festival

Official Selection - New York Film Festival

"Surely one of the most radical films to play in the Official Selection of Cannes ever."

- Mark Peranson, CinemaScope

"Liberté more than lives up to its title, suggesting that a truly free cinema is one that still believes in the possibility of subversion."

- Dennis Lim, ArtForum

"Audaciously perverse and amorphous... Conjures a sustained ambiance and eroticism that's unique to the language of cinema."

- Carson Lund, Slant

"This is both Serra’s most uncompromising film and his most enjoyable.."

- Ethan Vestby, The Film Stage