The Spirit of the Beeehive
El Espiritu de la Colmena
Victor Erice
Somewhere in Castille, in around 1940, two little girls, Isabel and Ana, go to a screening of Frankenstein. Isabel pretends to her sisters that she knows the "monster" personally, and that she often meets him in a nearby abandoned house...
With : Fernando Fernan Gomez, Teresa Gimpera, Ana Torrent, Isabel Telleria, Laly Soldevilla, Miguel Picasso
Screenplay : Víctor Erice
Image : Luis Cuadrado
Sound : Luis Rodriguez
Editing : Pablo G. del Amo
Music : Luis De Pablo
Screenplay : Víctor Erice
Image : Luis Cuadrado
Sound : Luis Rodriguez
Editing : Pablo G. del Amo
Music : Luis De Pablo
Production : Elías Querejera
Distribution: Carlotta Films
Distribution: Carlotta Films
"In El Espiritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive), Víctor Erice cleverly creates a troubling world which is simultaneously grandiose and sordid, hot and macabre, where a little girl becomes brutally aware of beings and things" (P. Royer). The first feature was released in Spain in 1973, in the throes of the Franco dictatorship: "What interests me is the underlying [political] discourse. It raises questions of the relationships between film and politics in the cinematographic representation of one of the richest periods of conflict: war and the post-war period all-too over-looked by Spanish cinema" (V. Erice). With El Espiritu de la colmena, Erice makes a courageous film, whose lead actress is the young prodigy Ana Torrent. She had already come to notice in Carlos Saura's famous Cría Cuervos (Raise Ravens).