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“Arguably the finest and most beautifully wrought first film of the European '70s” (Michael Atkinson) and a work for which the much-abused adjective “haunting” might have been invented, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE made Erice's international reputation and received countless awards. A poetic exploration of the world of two small girls who live in rural Spain in 1940, during Franco's dictatorship, the film has a dreamy, murmuring surface, but its serenity is only seeming. As the father placidly tends his beehives and the mother languorously writes letters to (possibly) her lover, the two girls plunge into a world of their own making. Ana (played by the astonishing child actress Ana Torrent) becomes obsessed with the film FRANKENSTEIN which she sees when a “movie truck” visits town. Her search for its monster, which she believes to be alive, takes the girl into a world of dreams, suspended hope, the unspoken legacy of the Spanish Civil War. “Not since René Clément's FORBIDDEN GAMES has any movie entered so deeply into the perilous country of children's nightmares and fantasies” ( The New York Times ). SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE was highly praised by Alberto Moravia and was recently presented by novelist Don DeLillo at the Telluride Film Festival, which indicates the immense reach of its circumscribed world.
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