(THE FEAST OF FOOLS)

La festa dels bojos bojos is a ‘short’ by Lluís Racionero filmed in 1979 in collaboration with Els Joglars and Albert Vidal.

In the Middle Ages on one day a year they celebrated the ‘Feast of Fools’. For twenty-four hours all the established values of the society were turned upside down, and license and excess, so severely repressed the rest of the time, were permitted. On this day, the people who barely survived on the margins of society had the world in their hands. Anything was allowed so long as the powers that ruled the land had the guarantee of regaining control for the other 364 days when dawn broke and everything returned to how it had been before, how it had always been.

La festa dels bojos is an allegory that, interpreting the painting by Jerónimo Bosch, ‘El Bosco’, uses the significance of that medieval festival as an invitation to the total freedom of mankind. Racionero makes his interpretation from the conviction that the work of this great Flemish painter deserves to be studied more deeply in order to gain fresh insights into the theories of liberation. Els Joglars form part of the cast that enact the ceremony of madness.

This ‘short’ won the Special Prize of the Jury, Fiction, at the Cannes Film Festival.

 

Production team