The Cathedral

Program:

Documentary competition

Year:

2022

Country:

Slovakia

Genre:

Documentary

Duration:

98’

A Spanish monk is expelled from his monastery at the age of 28 when he contracts tuberculosis. He returns home to Mejorada del Campo, a poor, forgotten village on the outskirts of Madrid. Depressed, and at a loss for how to dedicate his life to God, he decides to sell his family lands. For the next 60 years, with no help or prior architectural expertise, he builds a cathedral the size of Sagrada Familia using waste and recycled materials. He works mostly alone, without ever drawing a single sketch, while his community labels him a madman

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Denis Dobrovoda

Denis Dobrovoda is an Oscar and EFA-qualified film director and producer with experience in both documentary and fiction filmmaking. He released THE CATHEDRAL, which won the Best Film Award in the International Competition of the 62nd Krakow Film Festival and has qualified for both the Academy Awards and the European Film Awards. He also made two multi-award-winning narrative short films SAVAGE and APPARITION which enjoyed success at a number of festivals and were sold for broadcast on the BBC and ShortsTV.

Denis studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Oxford, and was also a diploma in Film Directing from the École Internationale de Création Audiovisuelle et de Réalisation (EICAR) in Paris.

Filmography: They Never Came Back (2021), Savage (2019), Apparition (2016)

Creative team

Director

Denis Dobrovoda

Screenplay

Matthew Bremner

Camera

Gonzalo Hernández-Vallejo Fernández

Editing

Ona Bartroli

Music

Thomas Ross Fitzsimons