The Spirit of the Beehive

Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena) opened in 1973 and won the San Sebastián Film Festival's Concha de Oro. The film was made in the final years of Franco's Spain, under explicit censorship; the political content is therefore encoded in childhood imagery, slow rural rhythms, and the metaphorical weight of a single film-screening sequence. The Spirit of the Beehive sits permanently in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll and is the most internationally celebrated Spanish film of its era.

1940, the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. In a remote Castilian village, six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent, in one of the great child performances of the medium, with eyes Erice cast for) attends the village screening of James Whale's Frankenstein. She becomes convinced the monster is real and benevolent, and begins searching for him in the surrounding meadows. A wounded fugitive (almost certainly a Republican on the run) appears in an abandoned barn, and Ana's monster begins to take a different form. Her older sister Isabel and her parents (the beekeeper father is one of the great quiet roles in Spanish cinema) move through the same days as if behind a screen.

Erice made only three further features in the next fifty years, El Sur, The Quince Tree Sun, Close Your Eyes. The first remains his masterpiece. Luis Cuadrado's photography, with its honey-yellow light and close attention to small domestic surfaces, is one of the most distinctive visual styles in 1970s European cinema.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The greatest Spanish film of the Franco era, and one of the most patient films about childhood ever made. Torrent's central performance is one for the long memory.