Stars: Ana Torrent, Isabel Telleria, Fernando Fernan Gomez, Teresa Gimpera

Director: Victor Erice

Summary: A young Spanish girl adjusts to normal life after the Spanish Civil War. Spanish dialogue with English subtitles.

Taking place in 1940's Spain; a country dealing with the aftermath of a divisive civil war, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is a haunting tale of life as seen through the eyes of a child. A travelling cinema comes to a small Spanish village to screen James Whale's film FRANKENSTEIN. A small girl, Ana, becomes entranced with Boris Karloff's monster in the film, and has a burning desire to meet him. When she cannot find the monster she transfers this desire into looking after a wounded army deserter.

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Victor Erice's hauntingly beautiful The Spirit of the Beehivefeatures 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 (played by six-year-old Ana Torrent) 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. Is she using her imagination to escape what is essentially a bleak reality, or is she protecting herself with an inner world of innocence, to counter the darker worldview of her slightly older sister Isabel?

While her emotionally distant parents go about their mundane daily affairs, Ana's world becomes the film's mesmerizing focus, and The Spirit of the Beehiveunfolds as an enigmatic yet totally captivating study of childhood unfettered by the strictures of reason. In Erice's capable hands, young Ana Torrent really isn't performing at all; her presence on screen is so natural, and so deeply expressive, that you almost feel as if she's living in the story being told--a story that retains its mystery and beauty in equal measure, full of visual symbolism and metaphor (including the title, which yields multiple meanings), yet never self-consciously "arty" or artificial. Simply put, this is one of the timeless masterpieces of cinema, produced at a time when Franco's repressive dictatorship was finally giving way to greater freedoms of expression. No survey of international cinema is complete without at least one viewing of this uniquely moving film.--Jeff Shannon

Main Language:	Spanish
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Trailer, Stills Gallery, Trailer Reel
Subtitles:	English
Year:	1973
Release Date:	October 27, 2003
Runtime:	93 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	O P T D 0036
Keywords:	Subtitled, General, Spirit, Spanish, Drama, La, El, De, Aka, Beehive, Espiritu, Colmena
Genre:	Drama