Sancho
2019 · 13m · España
Directed by Hugo De la Riva
Genres: adventure, comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, humorous, whimsical
Sancho is a lover of chivalry books, and such is his passion that he decides to live his own adventure. Judging himself unfit to embody any hero, since no knight-errant ever had his round figure, he convinces his neighbour Alonso Quijano — a well-off, womanising, pleasure-loving man of more suitable appearance and little wit — to star in it.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A meta-inversion of Don Quixote where the dreamer becomes the director and the rake becomes the reluctant hero—basically a buddy comedy about role-playing that subverts the original text by asking who's actually delusional here. Most scouts would file this under 'clever literary adaptation' and miss the delicious absurdity of Sancho's casting coup.
De la Riva demonstrates assured command of Cervantes' DNA while treating the material as satirical scaffold rather than sacred text; the film's formal restraint—its refusal to oversell the whimsy—positions it squarely in the lineage of literary adaptations that know their source well enough to question it.
The genius move is making Alonso's vapid handsomeness the entire engine of the narrative: one actor's ability to embody gorgeous incompetence opposite Sancho's scheming intelligence does all the heavy lifting, and suddenly a premise about delusion becomes a statement about who gets to be the protagonist.