“Lost In La Mancha” is a documentary that appeals to any who love movies. Directors Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton have done an extraordinary job showing us the hectic and un-seen world of pre-production.

The filmmakers documented the process while director Terry Gilliam was working on “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” a tale of a Spanish Knight driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances.

Joining the Madrid-based production team eight weeks before the shoot, the directors witness the successes as well as the failures involved in making a dream come true for Gilliam. However, problems start to emerge in no time and with a strict budget for a huge Hollywood film, reality starts to take its toll on the cast and crew. All the while with Pepe and Fulton already hands deep in their own documentary.

The directors do an outstanding job of turning the documentary into a story about surviving the battles that go along with filmmaking. By showing the cast and crew’s facial expressions and understanding the emotions that are involved, you are immediately drawn in, and can’t wait to see the ending results.

Incorporating Gilliam’s own storyboards, staged readings of the script, and including many rehearsed scenes, Gilliam’s Quixote came alive. They also conceived original animation to tell Quixote’s tale while filling in the story with Gilliam’s career history.

On the sixth day of production, things are slowed to a halt as flash floods destroy sets and damage camera equipment, and the lead actor falls seriously ill. Uniquely after Quixote’s cameras have stopped rolling, the documentary continues to record events as they unfold. The crew waits, insurance men and bondsmen scramble with calculators and interpretations of the damage and through it all Gilliam struggles to maintain both belief and momentum in his project.

It’s a very exciting world that Pepe and Fulton have brought the audience into.

Lost In La Mancha is less a process piece and more about filmmakers at work. It’s a powerful drama about the inherent fragility of the creative process and a compelling study of how, even with an abundance of the best will and passion, the artistic endeavor can seem like an impossible dream.

Pepe and Fulton has proved to the audience that filmmaking is much more complex than actors and actresses, they show us it’s about art. For those movie lovers like myself, you can come away with a better understanding and appreciation of the whole process, and still be entertained by this documentary.

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