Quote: He Dreams Of Giants

Rounding out this year’s DOC NYC preview is arguably the festival’s most anticipated premiere. In 2002, directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe made what remains one of the great portraits of an artist in crisis in the incredible documentary Lost in La Mancha. Genuinely one of the great films not just about filmmaking but of the artistic process writ large, La Mancha is a crushingly beautiful film about a film that was perceived genuinely doomed. Well, some 15-plus years and one completed Terry Gilliam-directed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote later and the pair are back, this time bringing to light the story of a filmmaker not so much destined for doom as one completely and utterly driven to overcome it at all costs, mental or physical. He Dreams of Giants doubles down on the “director in crisis” idea, this time putting both this documentary and the film it chronicles in conversation with Gilliam’s past work, his career writ large and his influences, specifically a film like 8 ½. It’s a gorgeously made, completely captivating deconstruction of one man’s artistic process and the lengths one will go to exorcise their proverbial demons. Living up to the hype set by their previous film, Fulton and Pepe return with a film that outdoes the portrait of a creatively blocked artist better than the film whose making is being portrayed. It’s really an absolute achievement.

Quote:Terry Gilliam’s decades-long quest to adapt Don Quixote was the stuff of cinema legend until 2018, when he finally premiered The Man Who Killed Don Quixote after some three decades of snafus. Some of those snafus– or what Gilliam would probably call fuckups– were captured in Lost in La Mancha, and now the directors of that 2002 film, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, are following it up with another behind-the-scenes doc. As Gilliam finally starts shooting his passion project, he says he’s “here to suffer like Don Quixote,” and that he does, with the cameras rolling the whole time. The result is a film that joins Hearts of Darkness and Burden of Dreams in the cannon of docs about famously tortured film shoots.

Quote:Over 25 years in the making, the film had its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival and now UK audiences can finally experience the film in all its cinematic glory, with a special Q&A event screening for one night only on the evening of Thursday 23rd January ahead of the film’s general release on Friday 31st January.