Lalo de Maria

Lalo is a French bullfighter. His commitment is spiritual, melancholic, obsessive, and hard for most to understand. This portrait reveals a rarely seen profession, a gaze into obsession, mystery, and faith at the heart of a vanishing tradition.

Lalo is mysterious: tall, blond, and French, he does not fit the traditional image of a bullfighter. His commitment is hard to explain. Why does a 26-year-old devote his life to it? The question remains unanswered. It is a passion with no reasonable explanation.

For two years, Ebrard followed Lalo not into the bullring, but into the tienta de toros: practice rings where matadors repeat gestures in silence, far from the crowd. There, another person mimics the bull, and the focus is on footwork, rhythm, and the search for art.

The images look inward, toward the months and weeks before the events. Toward the hard, lonely, almost trance-like-hypnotic commitment demanded by this path. There is melancholy, obsession, but also fragility in these images. The images hold a powerful ambivalence prompting reflection rather than judgment.

 Bullfighting still appears on the art pages of Spanish newspapers, yet for many outside Spain it is seen as cruel, a spectacle from another age. Within the tradition, however, it remains charged with ritual and meaning.

Ebrard likes to go to places that are out of bounds. Here she chooses to show only the beauty: the ballet between torero and phantom bull. Her hypnotic images transcend the limits of documentary, opening onto something mythical, ritualistic, and cinematic.
The bull, the eternal mirror of the matador does not appear until the end, and yet its presence is everywhere.

 Lalo de Maria does not glorify or condemn bullfighting. It is a portrait of a profession rarely seen, an exploration of obsession, mystery, and belief inside a tradition that is vanishing.