Victor Erice’s beautiful Spanish masterpiece, revered for its tender evocation of childhood imagination and astonishing performance by Ana Torrent.
Two young sisters watch Frankenstein in the village cinema while their father immerses himself in bee-keeping and their mother dreams about and writes to an unseen lover. The youngest of the girls becomes obsessed with the presence of the monster. She discovers a fugitive from the army hiding in a secret place which she associates with her ‘monster’. Utilising the country’s barren exteriors and the burnished browns and yellows of the girls’ shadowy village home with a painter’s eye, Victor Erice combines a marvellous vision of childhood discoveries with a visualisation of a dream world where, even in the darkness outside, strangers and monsters can take on a benevolent aspect and respond with love.
The film has been hugely influential, as both a yardstick of child performances on film, and for it’s sophisticated, sensitive window into the imaginations of children, traceable directly to films such as Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).
Spirit of the Beehive was also a favourite of Contemporary’s founder Charles Cooper.
The film will be introduced by film critic, lecturer and programmer Geoff Andrew.
“It is an astonishingly surefooted, beautiful and mature first film from a young Spaniard who must now be accounted one of the very best of Europe’s new talent. I beg you to see it because I sincerely believe it to be a little masterpiece of cinematic imagination.”
Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
“The film endows these adventures with a poetic, haunting quality partly because of the way the scene is captured in low pitched colours, backed sometimes by eerie music, sometimes by silence, partly because of the extraordinary quality of the child actress who plays Ana, whose sweet, serious little face is a marvellous mirror for a whole range of emotions, especially wonder.”
Patrick Gibbs, Daily Telegraph
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (El espíritu de la colmena) / Victor Erice / Spain / 1973 / 99 mins
Geoff Andrew has worked in film as a critic, lecturer and programmer for half a century. He was editor and chief critic of the film pages of Time Out for many years and head of programming for a decade and a half at BFI Southbank, formerly the National Film Theatre; he then continued as a senior member of the programming team until 2024. For much of the last decade he has been teaching and lecturing at the London Film School. He’s also written, edited and contributed to many books on the cinema.