Frieze Editor’s Picks is a biweekly column in which a cartoon editor shares his recommendations on what to watch, read and listen to.

Albert Serra, Afternoons of solitude (2024)

Serra’s rare and meditative documentary about the Peruvian-born young man bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey is two riveting hours of erotica and violence, although its brutality makes it difficult to watch. Most of the film captures Rey in her skilful dance with warring bulls – the cinema tense with anticipation of her possible gore – always giving victory to the skilled fighter and his unseen audience in the arena. Cinematographer Artur Tort Pujol shoots intimate close-ups of Rey and her contorted expressions, and scenes of the limousine rides that follow the exhibitions depict the young ascendant as she processes mixed feelings of pride, fear and aching exhaustion.

Wang Bing, “Youth” Trilogy (2023–2024)

Wang Bing’s Series – Spring premiered last year, Hard times and Homecoming earlier in 2024 – is a nearly ten-hour documentary about textile workers in Zhili, a city in China’s Zhejiang province. Inheriting Frederick Wiseman’s unobtrusive observational style—as well as Warhol’s machinic style, Wang films a multitude of characters—many identified by name, mostly in their late teens and early 20s—who were hired to work in factories that produce cheap clothes. It’s a remarkable, if inconsistent, and necessarily undramatic feat, a decision that serves not to romanticize Wang’s subjects. I just wish it was shown all at once so audiences could experience the realism with which it is so clearly provocative and innovative.

Monica de la Torre, Pause the document (2025)

De la Torre’s latest book – her 2020 sequel is excellent Rehearsal nineteen – commemorates the years in which it was written, insofar as it demonstrates how socio-political ruptures so quickly remind us of the fragile ground on which systems of logic and meaning rest. The second poem in the collection, “Parabola,” identifies the common etymological origins of both “palabra”—the Spanish word for “word”—and “parable”; a simile that draws attention to the curved, as opposed to linear, shape of a word’s meaning. It’s a great book about impermanence, trees, star paths, cabin fever, pre-linguistic infants and healing, looking at how “about the character of a poem has become its burden”.

Pause the document by Moníca de la Torre is published by Nightboat Press at the beginning of 2025.

^{Main image: Albert Serra, Afternoons of solitude2024, still in production. Courtesy: the artist and Andergraun Films}