Monday August 18 * 7pm * $10-20

Don Barry: A Quixotic Exploration re-enlivens the meta- narrative of Cervantes’ Don Quixote by placing a real-life experimental filmmaker, Barry Gerson, into the Don’s role and filming his life work’s exploration of madness in a mad world among the crowds of Mexico’s magical city of Guanajuato. 

The life and work of an experimental filmmaker in his 80s is layered atop the first great novel to draw out explorations of intuitive processes, cathartic landscapes, and the specters of death and creative succession. A young assistant (Sanchia, stand-in for Cervantes' Sancho Panza) helps revive Don Barry’s creative drive and push him to expand his cinematic explorations of light into new realms beyond narrative. The film is about the struggles that all artists face in today’s changing world. 

When I started to imagine the creation of my first feature film in my new hometown of Guanajuato, Mexico, I immediately thought of the work Guanajuato has embraced for half a century: Don Quixote. As I outlined an approach to Cervantes' iconic work, I was approached by the most quixotic of my friends, the experimental filmmaker Barry Gerson, then in his 80s and starting a new life. When Gerson asked if I could help him publish his hand-written notes on using color LED therapy lights to cure himself of "the maladies of aging," I realized he was Don Barry, and my film took shape. We designed the work to match the experimental and visionary elements in Gerson's films, and shot in real crowds, looking to offset our characters’ awkward realness with the realness of our magical city. We used dancers, local musicians, Senor Muerte. Don Barry ended up merging real life and the literary in actual settings. The film grew into a meditation on the redemptive nature of art and creativity. 

Barry Gerson is Don Barry. Gerson has been making experimental films and art since the 1960s, with his works collected by major museums across the globe and a long teaching career. He is a true modern iconoclast.