I’ve always believed that a movie cannot replace painting neither superimpose on it. It’s just something different. Still, if you look through the lens, in the rectangle of the camera you can figure the space of a canvas.
But that’s not all. What counts is not the shooting or the direction, indeed those are not the only creative moments. A lot happens during the editing or the music composing…It is a shape that comes to life slowly.
In many ways, cinema is comparable with sculpture.
When you mould clay or plaster you are just starting. Later on there’s the fusion, the filing, the glaze… Not only. The waiting time, the technical time of a movie as well as a sculpture are alike. And in the very moment you stop it happens that you look at your work with new eyes. And maybe you start again. To create a movie is something similar to the sculpture but it’s like to mould the light. That’s what won me over. To work with the light that materializes, becomes image, movement, words, sounds.
The meeting with the figure of Cervantes and his hidalgo’s synchronically confused features – utopia, dream, fantasy, sentiment, loftiness, pride, courage – has probably been what made me think of him as a possible subject of my first movie.
So my Quixote is born, through a Chinese boxes system, a structure able to endlessly reproduce innumerable suggestions.
The magic setting of the grand theatre of the black figured hidalgo is the ancient and remote land of Sannio, a site recreated through lights and photography by Cesare Accetta, geometrically pure and precise.

Mimmo Paladino