The Spirit of the Beehive

Director: Victor Erice Cast: Ana Torrent, Isabel Tellería, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Teresa Gimpera, Queti de la Cámara 1973, 99', Color Spanish with Turkish subtitles

Victor Erice's hauntingly beautiful film features one of the most unforgettable child performances in the history of cinema. Hailed as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Erice's visually elegant "poem of awakening" takes place in a small Castilian village in the early 1940s, as echoes of the Spanish Civil Wart can still be heard throughout the countryside. It is here, in this richly rural atmosphere, that six-year-old Ana is introduced to alternate world of myth and imagination when she attends a town-hall showing of James Whale's Frankenstein, an experience that forever alters young Ana's perception of the world around her... and her ability to mold reality to her own imaginative purposes.