El Sur

Director: Victor Erice

1983 / 95min / DCP

Ten years after his The Spirit of the Beehive, Erice emerged with another elegiac, exquisitely composed, and sublimely serene evocation of childhood memory, a film every bit the equal of his vaunted debut. The child in El Sur—routinely ranked among the greatest Spanish films of all time—is Estrella, a native of the country’s verdant north played as a teenager in 1957 by Icíar Bollaín and, in the flashbacks which make up the greater part of the film, as an eight-year-old by Sonsoles Aranguren; ruminating on her relationship with her recently departed father, a physician and dowser who’d run afoul of dictator Francisco Franco’s regime, she unearths a troubling trove of buried family secrets. Intended to run three hours before its producer abruptly shut down the shoot, it’s half a film that contains a whole world of wonders.

Distributor: Janus Film

Part of The Year Begins in Silence