Ten years after making his mark on Spanish cinema with The Spirit of the Beehive, Víctor Erice returned to filmmaking with this adaptation of a novella by Adelaida García Morales, which deepens the director’s fascination with childhood, fantasy, and the legacy of his country’s civil war. In the North of Spain, Estrella grows up captivated by her father, a doctor with mystical powers – and by the enigma of his youth in the South, a near-mythical region whose secrets haunt Estrella more and more as time goes on. Though Erice’s original vision also encompassed a section set in the South itself, scenes that were never shot, El Sur remains an experience of rare perfection and satisfaction, drawing on painterly cinematography by José Luis Alcaine to evoke the enchantments of memory and the inaccessible, inescapable mysteries of the past.

Víctor Erice is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in Spanish cinema, whose rare yet profoundly significant body of work unfolds across just three feature films. His career began with The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), an unforgettable fusion of childhood imagination and the atmosphere of post-Civil War Spain. A decade later, El Sur (1983) continued this poetic trajectory, delving into the elusive realms of family secrets and memory. After four decades of silence, Erice returned to the screen with Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos, 2023), a deeply personal and universally resonant meditation on art, identity, and the passage of time. Few filmmakers have created such a lasting legacy with so few works: each of his films stands alone as a self-contained universe, weaving together the personal and the national into a singular cinematic mythology.

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Close Your Eyes (2023)

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Director: Víctor Erice
Cast: Omero Antonutti, Sonsoles Aranguren, Icíar Bollaín
Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine
Screenwriter: Víctor Erice
Producer: Elías Querejeta
Editor: Pablo G. del Amo
Music: Eduardo Fernández, Antonio Illán
Hungarian Distributor: -
Colour: colour
min: 95 mins

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