Encompassing moviemaking, personal history, and a defense of individual freedoms, Albert Serra’s spirited and opinionated manifesto A Toast to St Martirià (144 pages; Coffee House Press) pays tribute to the filmmaker’s hometown of Banyoles in northeastern Catalonia. Given as a public talk at the small town’s annual festival celebrating its patron saint, Serra’s speech (translated from the Catalan by Matthew Tree) reveals the surprising ways in which his trajectory has been determined by his humble place of origin.

From the outset, the director focuses on locality, reveling in Banyoles’s valuation of emotional connection in contrast to the “nervous living” of the big city—where, Serra contends, relationships tend to be determined along the lines of intellectual or personal interests, with their value decided by an individual’s unique contribution. Where the Banyoles of his imagination possesses a rhythm of life with special “singularity,” a “peculiarity” without plan or uniformity, city life for Serra has eroded these qualities, resulting in the precedence of a monetary economy, with resultant consequences on the mind. Knowing this, Serra champions and celebrates the festes, the Catalan word for partying. Reveling in his love for instinct and the impulse of natural fraternity, Serra proudly bears his rural influences, allowing an unknown logic to enter his way of being—and an approach to filmmaking that retains an openness to the possibilities, to the latent unpredictability of chaos.

At the same time, Serra acknowledges the limitations of Banyoles, offering the metaphor of a picture frame curtailing his life, its restrictiveness impeding him from attaining the cosmopolitanism of a more expansive worldview. With a youthful vigor and predilection for play, he charts his history as an unknown hopeful, by serendipity finding his way to the Cannes and Locarno film festivals. His is an uplifting story of stops and starts  and the impact of human connection along his journey. From attending tertúlias—regular and informal meetings of artists—to sharing with others the mysterious atmosphere of nighttime, Serra reveals himself as a masterful storyteller, while also providing nuggets on his art, such as film being a kind of “parallel world,” “the only reality that doesn’t disappear.” He notes the profound influence books have made on his films, and how his appreciable understanding of acting guides his style of directing, as he tries to give form to the actor’s gaze and “fatal, unpredictable gestures,” the means of creating a “human and plastic” fate.

A Toast to St Martirià takes the town Serra hails from and explodes it as a concept. The Banyoles he recreates, whether on the page or in his filmography, reminds us to celebrate our freedom of expression and personal commitment—and that no risk is too great when preserving our inalienable right to liberation.

Danielle Shi is a writer and photographer based in Berkeley. Her work can be found at Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Rumpus, La Piccioletta Barca, The Margins, and Common Forms.