Lope Serrano’s kind of magic

If winning Best Production Company of 2025 at the Kinsale Shark Awards wasn’t enough for director Lope Serrano’s CANADA, winning Production Company of the Year at the shots Awards – with Serrano also taking Director of the Year and his Hornbach No Project Without Drama film winning multiple Golds for Direction, Concept, Production Design, Sound, and Music – well you could say Serrano is having a moment.

When it comes to drama condensed to just over two minutes, little prepares you for the orchestral surrealism and cinematic sleights of hand that propel No Project Without Drama for German DIY chain Hornbach into the top rank of commercials.

The real challenge was to create something aligned with Hornbach’s legacy: an intelligent, sharp message, slightly self-aware.

A surrealism grounded in painful actuality, it begins with a dripping bathroom pipe and ends with a steaming new bath, an ominous black-clad choir surrounding the set as it unfolds and reassembles through jump cuts and set changes to wonderfully realised dream scenarios giving voice to plumbing disasters and their aftermath.

Above: Serrano’s goal with Hornbach’s No Project Without Drama, was to create something ‘theatrical in the most artisanal and physical sense of the word'.

Anyone who’s had to deal with a leak before it becomes a torrent will feel the visceral realism of the spot, however surreal its imagery. “It was,” says Serrano, “a great opportunity offered by a truly unique agency [Heimat TBWA] and a client, who honestly trusts in the power of imagination…

That’s where the choir came in, commenting on the action like a rough, visceral omniscient narrator—one that can’t speak, only make sounds.

“It was,” says Serrano, “a great opportunity offered by a truly unique agency [Heimat TBWA] and client, who honestly trust in the power of imagination.” Things like letting people see and hear the chorus of characters who create the piece’s own soundtrack; making the storm an obvious exaggeration of the flooding; having the woman use the plunger as a ridiculous weapon of protection against despair; turning the drops of water into hyper-excited goblins; and keeping the theatricality, in general, minimal and simple.

Above: The many innovations in the Hornbach spot include depicting a plumbing flood as storm and having the soundtrack-providing mysterious chorus observers of the drama. 

“The real challenge,” he adds, “was to create something aligned with Hornbach’s legacy: an intelligent, sharp message, slightly self-aware, with an execution that was as practical as possible. It needed to feel theatrical in the most artisanal and physical sense of the word, but also aesthetic.”

[Founding CANADA] was the closest thing to forming a band, with fewer vices and a bit more strategy – though not much more, I’d say.

It’s a work that raises the bar sonically, visually and imaginatively, while remaining firmly grounded in the real world, however surreal its depiction and cinematic its style. It’s all of a piece when it comes to some of the signature moves Serrano makes as a director.

After studying film and TV in the noughties, then working in local TV, he fell in with a group of ad and music video directors, joining forces with them to launch CANADA in 2008, when he was 32, with fellow directors Nicolás Méndez and Luis Cerveró, and producer Alba Barneda. “It was the closest thing to forming a band, with fewer vices and a bit more strategy – though not much more, I’d say,” recalls Serrano.

It is, he adds, more a collective than a company, handling both direction and production, developing a recognisable style while being tough to file among the usual categories. “CANADA was born from complicit friendship, but it’s also a place – and this is important, because the culture of the physical office has been a fundamental trait of the company – where other sensibilities could gather.”

Above: In Crème Caramel, Serrano channelled “a gentle, slightly insolent fetishism, done in a light, playful, pleasurable way”.

One of his, and CANADA’s, breakthrough pieces was the erotic, witty and very cleverly twisted Crème Caramel, for Nowness. Narrated by the voice of a young woman, it begins, “He found her body was a wonderful succession of details … it was the little details that drove him crazy.” With the roving, fluid camerawork aping the fixated, unquenchable heterosexual male gaze, and a soundtrack by French band La Femme, the narrator is, eventually, utterly consumed, in one mouthful and without hands, too.

I’ve greatly enjoyed the calm solitude that comes from the attentive act of drawing.

“It was an exercise in language and a certain shamelessness,” admits Serrano. “The idea was to do something around bodily beauty. Today the text might seem controversial, but I wrote it without any provocative intention. It was simply a way of praising what I find attractive in the female body. A gentle, slightly insolent fetishism, done in a light, playful, pleasurable way.”

Serrano started out as an animator before taking his place behind the camera. “I’ve greatly enjoyed the calm solitude that comes from the attentive act of drawing,” he says. “I’d redraw things I liked and edit them together, often with shots from other films.”

[Jean Luc Godard was] a modern classic, a traditionalist modernist, a bourgeois Marxist, a romantic misogynist, a kleptomaniac boss, a technophile Luddite, a dogmatic individualist.

Movies had grabbed his collar early on; among his early inspirations was Jean Luc Godard. “I had a truly formative, almost transcendent encounter with Godard during my years of artistic formation,” he says. “I discovered someone who spoke to me out of a profound love for cinema.”

Above: The multi award-winning short, The Cause of the Accident That Started the Fire, is a surreal take on the realities of production.

He cites Alphaville, Le Mépris, À bout de souffle, Bande à Part as favourites. “Godard was a shy arrogant man,” he adds, “a modern classic, a traditionalist modernist, a bourgeois Marxist, a romantic misogynist, a kleptomaniac boss, a technophile Luddite, a dogmatic individualist. There are so many contradictions and so many ideas in his work– along with, in my view, an exquisite sense for poetic discovery.”

Having a lot of creative freedom can also be an abyssal experience. Limits help you find form more quickly.

While contradictions can be a fertile seed bed for creativity, it’s poetic discovery that drives the nine-minute short, The Cause of the Accident That Started the Fire, another big winner at the 2025 shots Awards, and one focused on the agonies and ecstasies of creation.

“The brief was to create a predominantly visual piece that showcased Spanish audiovisual talent,” he says. “It was a very open brief, with a highly uncertain outcome, and having a lot of creative freedom can also be an abyssal experience. Limits help you find form more quickly; without them, it’s easy to get lost.”

Featuring a young director, Greta Prieto, looking for the clarity to find her way through a film job, it mixes the agonies of the creative process with the ecstasies of their often random, accidental resolution. And with the realities of production conjured in strikingly surreal jump-cuts swerving and crashing from sound stage, set and crew into dramatic images from an unboundaried imagination that ignites into a fire that consumes creative doubts.

I believe films are the closest thing to reality outside of reality itself.

Like No Project Without Drama, it employs musicians, dancers, an orchestral score, and a relentless, fast-paced crossing of imagined and actual borders. For Serrano, it was like entering the confessional, pulling back the curtain on the arduous, sometimes ecstatic, otherworldly process that goes into conceiving a work before its making. “We decided to turn that neurotic process into a spectacle in itself, to not let darkness overpower light. It was an extremely intense process,” he adds, “where it was very easy to fall through the looking glass with so much self-representation and meta-language. At its core, I was trying to explain things I’d felt before: that terrible sense of guilt linked to ridicule, the shame of feeling like a fraud, and also, surely, the ecstasy of reaching the end of the tunnel.”