By Anna Zhila

Orson Welles began filming his Don Quixote in the summer of 1957 with Spanish exile Francisco Reiguera as the knight and Akim Tamiroff as Sancho Panza. It was never a conventional shoot. Without a proper budget and with a taste for experiment, Welles filmed when he could - a few days in 1957, a few more in Rome in 1958, then again in 1961 while shooting a television series for RAI in Spain. When both lead actors died in 1972 he kept working, switched to colour, recast, and insisted the end was near. He never finished.

Almost seventy years later the film may finally be seen as Welles imagined it, not as a finished work but as a comprehensible mosaic. Four public film archives have agreed to pool everything they hold: Filmoteca Española in Madrid, Cinecittà in Rome where editor Mauro Bonanni kept material, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris with eighty minutes of 35mm positives, and the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin with work prints, negatives, fragments and paper documents. Together they amount to about 70,000 metres of film - more than thirty hours of projection.

Filmoteca Española will gather the material in Madrid. The historian, writer and Orson Welles specialist Esteve Riambau will examine it and try to put the film in order. He presented the project at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna.

A puzzle without a single image

The closest most viewers have come to Welles' Quixote is Don Quijote de Orson Welles, assembled in 1992 by Jesus Franco, Welles' close friend, for the Seville Expo. Franco cut together the Spanish holdings and the RAI documentary footage. It was a brave placeholder, but it was not Welles' structure.

The problem has always been dispersion. Oja Kodar, Welles' partner and collaborator, recovered about 50,000 metres of negative from Bonanni in 2017 - roughly the same amount held in Spain. France and Germany hold the rest. No single archive could see the whole.

Riambau describes the task as a large puzzle with missing pieces. The team knows roughly how many are missing, but they have enough to show what the whole might have been. He is clear about the limit: the group will not finish a film that Welles did not finish. The aim is to arrange the surviving material so that a viewer can sense where Welles was heading.

Il mio bambino

Welles called the project Il mio bambino - my child. At Bologna, Riambau recalled the famous Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane and suggested a parallel: what if Welles' Rosebud was Quixote itself. For Welles, Quixote was more than a literary adaptation. Riambau argues the identification was double - Welles was both the delusional knight and the grounded squire.

That identification helps explain why the film kept changing. The script was labyrinthine, rewritten perpetually, with different versions of the same scene coexisting. To handle it, the team will work scientifically. No scene that was not shot will be recreated, nothing will be invented. The method is archival, not speculative.

A shared archive without a commercial clock

The four archives bring a rare advantage: no commercial pressure and no fixed deadline. That shared ethos matters because the material resists a quick assembly. The plan, as Riambau outlined it with caution and humour, is to spend 2026 ordering the script and digitising, 2027 comparing script and footage, and 2028 working with a professional editing team to assemble the material into an unfinished but presentable form.

He jokes that he does not want the project to inherit Welles' old title, When Will You Finish Don Quixote? - the question people once asked Welles himself.

Thirty hours to sort

The scale is daunting. Riambau has seen parts of the material, but not all. The first job is simply to know what survives and what does not - and to worry, as he puts it, about what may survive but whose location is still unknown.

Even if everything is found, the result will remain incomplete by definition. The value, as he frames it, is not in delivering a lost masterpiece, but in making the existing work legible. Viewers will be able to see where Welles was, even if they cannot see where he would have ended.

For art history, the project is a reminder that some works live as process. Welles shot Quixote across eras, stocks and aspect ratios, turning a 17th-century novel into a diary of his own exile and invention. Four public institutions have now given that diary a table to be laid out on. What emerges will be fragmentary, rigorous and, for the first time, close to the delirium Welles carried for three decades.

Source: Javier Zurro, elDiario.es, 21 August 2026. Film still: Francisco Reiguera as Don Quixote, Filmoteca Española.