Project Detail

He Dreams of Giants

Synopsis

Film director Terry Gilliam has been dreaming of a screen adaptation of 'Don Quixote' for over 30 years. When he attempted the first 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 now-famous, ill-fated production only further cemented Gilliam’s reputation as an idealist chasing an impossible dream.
HE DREAMS OF GIANTS picks up Gilliam’s story 17 years later as he finally gets the film into production and 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 one completes the project that has defined the good part of a career?
Combining immersive verité footage of Gilliam’s production with intimate interviews and archival footage from Gilliam’s entire career, HE DREAMS OF GIANTS is a revealing portrait of a late-career artist and a meditation on the value of creativity in the face of mortality.
Official Selection DOC NYC 2019 - World premiere

Details

Year
2019
Type of project
Features
Running time
85 min
Format
HD
Director
Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe
Producer
Lucy Darwin, Keith Fulton
Co-Producer
Alex Dunnett
Executive Producer
Hani Farsi, Ali Fikree, Omar Fikree, Ari Ioannides
Editor
Bill Hilferty, Nyneve Laura Minnear; Supervising Editor: Janus Billeskov Jansen
Director of Photography
Louis Pepe
Sound
Keith Fulton
Composer
Jacasek
Principal cast
Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Pryce, Adam Driver

Categories

Production Status

Production Company

Quixote Productions Limited

Lucy Darwin
41 Wood Lane
London
N6 5UD

Page updates

This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.

See also

You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.

A man stood on a chair wipes water vapour with his hand off the glass cover of a memorial board in a stone brick chapel. Adlais

Director: Alex Darby, George Leith, Sophie Mei Birkin

Year: 2026

Adlais (Echo) weaves Welsh language folklore and histories through their shared subjects of poetry and drowning – and asks whether we’re listening to the past as it surfaces today.

A woman paints on a large canvas in bright colours The End of Times

Director: Luca Anzalone

Year: 2026

Caught between her indigenous Buryat roots—where art is a shamanic window between worlds—and a Western market that treats culture as a commodity, artist Yuma Radne constructs a monumental canvas to confront the psychological distortions of colonization at the edge of an irreversible era. "Either you make art, or you suffer. It’s like a curse." For painter Yuma Radne, the act of creation is not an aesthetic choice, but an ancestral code carried in the blood. Moving from a remote Siberian village to the high-stakes European art world, Yuma finds herself navigating a surreal landscape where sacred cultural identity is rapidly converted into a luxury product. Through intimate studio dialogues and raw philosophical reflections, the film captures the gruelling physical and mental labour behind her graduation masterpiece, The End of Times. Centred around a gargantuan erupting booze (a traditional Buryat dumpling) mutated into an absurd, monumental symbol of a colonised and erased national identity, the film transcends a typical artist portrait. It becomes a vital, cosmic meditation on why humanity continues to create art in the face of systemic collapse—and a powerful testament to an indigenous culture refusing to be reduced to a souvenir.

A lady with white hair sat in a chair talking with a customer surrounded by fabrics Tobias and the Angel

Director: Mark Forbes

Year: 2021

Tobias & The Angel are famous for their shop in West London where all the different aspects of what they do that are combined to make it feel like home. The shop is owned and run by Angel Hughes and has a story to tell about her family beginnings.