The Spirit of the Beehive

Director: Victor Erice

1973 / 99min / 35mm

Once you fall under the arresting spell of Erice’s classic of Spanish cinema, the film—and the luminous images of cinematographer Luis Cuadrado, whose eyesight had begun to fail during its filming!—never leave you. In one of the most magnetic performances ever given by a child actor, six-year-old Ana Torrent (also wonderful in Cría cuervos... a few years later) plays a girl hypnotized and terrified by a screening of Frankenstein that shows in her small village as part of a traveling movie show. Setting his film in the closing days of the Spanish Civil War, in which his protagonist will become an unwitting participant, Erice brilliantly enters the mysterious inner world of his juvenile heroine, creating a transfixing portrait of childhood informed by movies and imagination.