Sergio Pérez

A sick dog and a man who loses the keys to his apartment while wearing flip-flops. With that premise, Sergio Pérez built one of the most suffocating films in Spanish independent cinema of the last decade. The project had no tricks, no flashy stars and no concessions to a comfortable box office.

Nobody in the industry expected such a knockout.

We're talking about a filmmaker who sees the screen as a wound that shouldn't be stitched up in a hurry. His name is credited as Sergio Pérez or Sergi Pérez interchangeably, but his visual signature leaves no doubt about authorship, because every shot he frames aims to pin the viewer against the seat.

Learning to Prune at Film School

Before stepping behind the camera, he studied Fine Arts and then attended the Higher School of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts of Catalonia to specialize in directing. Those formative years taught him the value of physical film and the economy of the frame. In 2005, he presented El buen aviador as his final thesis project and managed to make a mark at the San Sebastián International Film Festival.

But his real breakthrough came shortly after. In 2007, he wrote and directed Vestido nuevo, a thirteen-minute short about a boy who goes to school wearing his sister's skirt on Carnival day. The film won at the Málaga Film Festival and collected more than forty awards at international festivals, thanks to a dry style that avoided easy melodrama.

And the industry took notice of his pulse.

During that period, he directed music videos for Catalan pop bands such as Manel and Mishima, exploring different narrative rhythms. In music videos like Benvolgut, he tested handheld camera techniques that he later brought to his narrative feature without softening their roughness.

A Dying Dog and a Locked Apartment

His first feature was made without official offices or large public grants. Sergio Pérez pooled his savings, ran a crowdfunding campaign and brought together a small team of loyal collaborators to get the project off the ground outside the major TV networks.

The shoot cost less than one hundred thousand euros and was completed in four weeks of grueling work on the streets of Barcelona. The director lost sixteen kilos during filming due to the physical strain of the shoot.

In 2014, The Longest Way Home premiered at the Seville European Film Festival. Actor Borja Espinosa carried the film's entire weight as Joel, a man trapped in a devastating grief who wanders in search of help for his absent wife's dying dog.

Audiences in theaters were instantly divided.

Specialist critics praised the emotional brutality of the story and its refusal to offer condescending explanations to the audience. In 2016, the Catalan Film Academy awarded him the Gaudí for Best Film, beating productions with four times his box office budget.

From the Classroom to Live Sound

After the success of his debut feature, he chose to combine writing with teaching at ESCAC itself, training new generations of directors and editors. As a result, his work pace avoided the industry's usual commercial rush, turning down routine television assignments to focus on slow-burning auteur projects.

Because the cinema Pérez champions always grows out of material discomfort. In 2020, he led filmmaking workshops where he insisted that students work on off-screen sound before designing complex camera shots.

And the method doesn't fool anyone.

For the final cut of The Longest Way Home, the technical team used three live sound recordings and discarded ninety percent of the incidental music, leaving the final mix at 5.1 with only the hum of the street and the strained breathing of the lead actor at 24 bits.