Dear Programmers:

TFC is proud to be part of the final chapter of one of cinema’s greatest journeys, master filmmaker Terry Gilliam’s (Brazil, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 12 Monkeys, etc.) epic quest to film his personal adaptation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. A surreal and tortured voyage originally captured in the classic 2002 doc Lost In La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe, Gilliam finally completed his opus The Man Who Killed Don Quixote last year, when it premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

Now, Fulton and Pepe are back with HE DREAMS OF GIANTS, a truly stunning portrait of Gilliam’s final push to finish the film. Throw out everything glamorous you ever imagined about filmmaking, and insert the harshest realties you’ve ever seen onscreen, and you can begin to imagine this film. Truly larger-than-life and stranger-than-fiction, HE DREAMS OF GIANTS is one of the most intense meditations on the nature and horror of making art ever put on film.

If you are a programmer, you are going to LOVE it! If you are a filmmaker, you’re going to run screaming out of the theater!

For screeners, please contact festivals@thefilmcollaborative.org. And trust us, this is one all cineastes and cinephiles need to see!

2019 | UK | 83 min.

Directors Keith Fulton, Lou Pepe
Producers Lucy Darwin, Keith Fulton
Executive Producers Hani Farsi, Ali Fikree, Omar Fikree, Ari Ioannides
Editors Bill Hilferty, Janus Billeskov Jansen, Nyneve Laura Minnear
Cinematographers Lou Pepe, Jeremy Royce
Music Michał Jacaszek

ABOUT THE FILM:
From the team behind Lost in La Mancha and The Hamster Factor, HE DREAMS OF GIANTS is the culmination of a trilogy of documentaries that have followed film director Terry Gilliam over a twenty-five-year period. Charting Gilliam’s final, beleaguered quest to adapt Don Quixote, this documentary is a potent study of creative obsession.

For over thirty years, Terry Gilliam has dreamed of creating a screen adaptation of Cervantes’ masterpiece. When he first attempted the production in 2000, Gilliam already had the reputation of being a bit of a Quixote himself: a filmmaker whose stories of visionary dreamers raging against gigantic forces mirrored his own artistic battles with the Hollywood machine. The collapse of that infamous and ill-fated production—as documented in Lost in La Mancha—only further cemented Gilliam’s reputation as an idealist chasing an impossible dream.

HE DREAMS OF GIANTS picks up Gilliam’s story seventeen years later as he finally mounts the production once again and struggles to finish it. Facing him are a host of new obstacles: budget constraints, a history of compromise and heightened expectations, all compounded by self-doubt, the toll of aging, and the nagging existential question: What is left for an artist when he completes the quest that has defined a large part of his career?

Combining immersive verité footage of Gilliam’s production with intimate interviews and archival footage from the director’s entire career, HE DREAMS OF GIANTS is a revealing character study of a late-career artist, and a meditation on the value of creativity in the face of mortality.

FESTIVALS
2019: AFI FEST, DOC NYC

FESTIVAL TERRITORIES
The World

EXHIBITION FORMATS
DCP, Blu-Ray

MORE INFO:
hedreamsofgiants.com

Email us for screeners or streaming links.