With that declaration of self-knowledge tempered with self-defeat, visionary director Terry Gilliam cosmically curses an already cursed career as his production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote encounters a series of Biblical misfortunes before imploding like a diving bell. Always driven by a singular vision and, yes, a quixotic sense of whimsy, Gilliam's career is one marked by nervous breakdowns, psychosomatic paralysis, disastrous test screenings, and, in one instance (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), a box-office boondoggle that served to throw Gilliam into what appears to be eternal disrepute in a fickle modern Hollywood.

Forced to find independent financing, Gilliam went abroad in the new millennium in a quest for the culminating picture of his auteurist concerns: a retelling and updating of Cervantes' Don Quixote and the most expensive film ($32M) ever financed completely outside the United States. Essentially a companion piece to The Hamster Factor documentary found on the 12 Monkeys Collector's Edition DVD, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's Lost in La Mancha is a video diary of catastrophe as six days into the shoot of Gilliam's tenth feature-length film, production folded.

Beset by plagues as Byzantine as F-16 flyovers courtesy the Spanish air force, a flash flood carrying away equipment and film stock, the disappearance of the sun, and finally the loss of the lead actor (Jean Rochefort) to a herniated disc, Lost in La Mancha paints an ugly picture of the delicate machinations of a major film project balanced eternally between artistic gratification and sudden collapse. Fulton and Pepe are brilliant filmmakers in their own right, framing Gilliam trudging lost across a mud flat like the manifestation of his demented hero while the ethereally beautiful whore/inamorata Dulcinea (Vanessa Paradis) is seen only in teasing test footage. Johnny Depp, the modern Sancho for Rochefort's knight errant, plays the steadfast foil to a crumbling Gilliam, providing a busload of French investors a moment's hope right before the fall.

Though an end title informs that Gilliam summoned the means to buy back his script from the insurance company that shut the picture down, a recent visit to Telluride confirmed that the snake-bit director is still without a next project (his adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens has, likewise, amounted to naught). Tantalizing with a few finished 35mm clips from The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, screen tests, and enough costumes and puppets to torture any die-hard Gilliam fan, Lost in La Mancha is a portrait of genius and a journal of the toll that cynicism takes on the heart of even the most hopeful of men. Like Quixote regaining his sanity only to face his death at the end of Cervantes' tale, Gilliam is the first to throw in his hat in Lost in La Mancha ("I just haven't the strength to fight anymore"). There is no better indictment of the bankruptcy of artistry in big-budget cinema than the failure of Terry Gilliam, and his resignation is just one sad moment in the midst of a picture that is itself a bitter drought of the keenest kind of poetic irony.-Walter Chaw