Knight’s Honor

Lluís Carbó was an aging former tennis instructor from Banyoles, the small city in northern Catalonia where Albert Serra grew up, when the Catalan filmmaker hired him to play Don Quixote in his first feature—a mischievous, startling, and fiercely minimalist reimagining of Cervantes. Using a “not pure HD” Panasonic camera, Serra shot the wandering knight (Carbo) and his squire Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat, also a non-actor) passing through stunning pastoral landscapes, indulging in the moments of stillness and splendor they created. The result was a sequence of mesmerizing vignettes that could have been the moments between Don Quixote’s grand setpieces. At once scrappy and magisterial, Knight’s Honor marked the arrival of one of contemporary cinema’s great original minds. 35mm print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.