The Spirit of the Beehive
Call Number: SPAFFDVDS15, Digital Video
Alternate Title: El espíritu de la colmena
Year: 1973
Director: Víctor Erice
Duration: 99 mins
Language(s): Spanish
Subtitle Language(s): English
The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of the country’s devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. Produced as Franco’s long regime was nearing its end, The Spirit of the Beehive is a bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made. It is an allegory of life after Gen. Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War and its affects on life in a remote village in the 1940s.