With a scrupulously honest visual style built on sequence shots that cast the characters stunningly against an empty sky and disorientating roaming hand-held close-ups, and Serra’s skilful management of silence that punctuates an almost music-free soundtrack with Quixote’s wonderful rambling monologues, Honor de cavallería parodies our hero’s illusory pursuit of chivalry as an eternal waiting that would be Beckettian but for the warmth and precision of its comic timing.Īnother film whose sparse rhythm, style and dialogue betrayed a rare narrative sensibility was Hamaca paraguaya ( Paraguayan Hammock, Paz Encina, 2006), which converts silence, inertia and repetition into a captivating emotional portrait of a key episode in Paraguay’s history. Intriguing, and surely aimed more at a festival audience than a wider public, was Albert Serra’s Catalan-language adaptation of Don Quixote, Honor de cavalleria ( Honour of the Knights, 2006), which touchingly captures the friendship between a senile, rambling Quixote and a virtually mute Sancho Panza as an unshakeable bond built upon fragility and self-doubt. This tendency should strike a chord among the burgeoning young generation of filmmakers in Mexico who are learning to make movies in spite of a harsh financial climate and difficulty of access to distribution (the recent rash of Mexican operas primas is testament to their success) and Ayala Blanco’s comment proved particularly revealing in relation to a certain current within the official fiction selection.
Its efforts to promote independent cinema by working with, rather than against, the city’s dominant exhibitor Cinemex (controlled by a consortium of US-based investment funds) causes consternation in some quarters, although the programmers’ willingness to give prominence to young directorial debuts, and the attempts to forge links with the capital’s academic and critical communities through parallel events, are certainly praiseworthy.Īt a film analysis session held parallel to the festival, veteran Mexican film historian Jorge Ayala Blanco observed an austerity of form and rhythm in much current independent filmmaking, which he put down to a generational reaction against the stylistic excesses enabled by technological developments of recent decades. Navigating around Ficco can be as frustrating as trying to move about the vast metropolis that hosts it: the last-minute timetable alterations and lack of information that still plague the festivalgoer would appear to be down to the event, like the city, having expanded beyond its means and with woefully insufficient planning during its lifetime to date. Ficco is part of an effort to make independent cinema exhibition financially viable in Mexico’s capital by giving it a rare platform in commercial theatres (its vocation is “training audiences”, in festival director Paula Astorga’s words), and offers a forum for, without laying special emphasis on, home-grown production.
Honor of the Knights appeared in a tie for seventh place on Cahiers du Cinema 's top ten list of 2007.While the holy trinity of contemporary Mexican cinema, Alejandro González Inárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro, stepped up to receive well-deserved Oscars, in their nation’s capital, from which all three directors have drifted away in recent years to pursue high-profile multinational projects, the young, ambitious and fast-growing Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival (Ficco) was underway. Serra’s vision, the film’s emotional payoffs are devastating". Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for The New York Times, called the film "a virtual definition of the phrase 'acquired taste'", but added that "if you invest yourself in Mr. The film was screened at the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. I don’t care about being more or less faithful to the original source or character that comes from literature or history". on things I love better than just showing the plot.
Serra explained that he chose the subject-matter of the film so he could "focus on atmosphere.
The film re-envisions the adventures from the Miguel de Cervantes novel Don Quixote, eschewing the Cervantes narrative in favour of placing Quixote and Sancho Panza on a contemplative, wandering story. Honor of the Knights ( Catalan: Honor de cavalleria also known as Honor of the Knights/Quixotic) is a 2006 slow film by Catalan auteur Albert Serra.
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