INSTITUTO Cervantes, together with the Embassy of Spain and the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP), is holding this month a series of film screenings in honor of the 400th death anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes.
Currently running at the FDCP Cinematheque in Manila, it is screening the animation film directed by Cruz Delgado in 1997. Based on Cervantes’s classic novel Don Quixote, this animation film is an adaptation of a television series produced for Televisión Española and shown between 1979 and 1981.
Instituto Cervantes is also screening El Caballero Don Quijote (Gutiérrez Aragón, 2001). It is an exquisite film adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s classic. This is the story of a compulsive chivalry-novels reader, who loses his sanity and start believing to be a knight named Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Accompanied by his neighbor Sancho Panza, a farmer who becomes his squire, Don Quixote decides to go on imaginary adventures. On their journeys, they rescue dames in distress in honorable acts and fight giants among other perils, with Don Quixote longing to be with the love of his life, Lady Dulcinea, and Sancho waiting to be rewarded with an island.
It has also screened the feature film Las Gallinas de Cervantes (Alfredo Castellón, 1988). Based on the story of the same name by Ramón J. Sender, it is about Cervantes’s wife, Doña Catalina, and the metamorphosis she underwent in the face of her husband’s disorientation.
His wife’s peculiar family fascinates and horrifies the writer, who can only talk about the situation with his friend, Doménicos Theotocópulos, El Greco, for whom he poses as a model for The Burial of Count Orgaz.
Last, there is the 2007 documentary Quixote Rides Through Cinema, directed by Marchena and Javier Rioyo. The documentary is a journey to the Dismal Knight and his loyal Squire’s adventures in cinema.
Different adaptations from directors, such as Orson Welles, Georg-Wilhem Pabst, Eric Rohmer and Grigori Kózintsev or the Spaniard Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón y Vicente Escrivá, are included in this documentary, which highlights the many facets under which the universal Wandering Knight has been portrayed on the big screen since the beginning of the 20th century.
Rioyo’s and Marchena’s documentary brings together the first movie based on Cervantes’s novel, Aventures de Don Quichotte de la Mancha by Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet, produced in France in 1903, and the others produced in different countries.
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CERVANTES WILL ALWAYS BE #1 IN THE WORLD OF LITERATURE, AS WELL AS HIS 659 CHARACTERS IN HIS IMMORTAL NOVEL!