A study of the work of Victor Erice, a Basque filmmaker who made just four (festival prize winning) feature films in a sixty year career.

Victor Erice (born 1940) is a Basque filmmaker who has made just four feature films over a career spanning sixty years. He has also made around fourteen short films of various kinds. His output might be limited but all four features have won major prizes at film festivals. This event will focus on his three fiction features, each of which involves ideas about history and memories as well as cinema.

The Spirit of the Beehive (Spain 1973) has been praised as the best Spanish film ever made. It shares several elements with Erice's second film El sur (Spain 1983), both films focusing on a girl growing up in Franco's Spain, the first in 1940 and the second in the late 1950s. In both films the girl's relationship with her father is key.

The third film, Close Your Eyes (Spain 2023) deals with a more recent past and the strange disappearance of an actor during the filming of a feature. Around twenty years later new developments force the aborted film's director to search again for his friend, the missing actor.

We will screen El sur in full and offer extended extracts of the other two films in an attempt to discover just how Erice is able to generate so much emotion from his characters and their situations and how we can learn from his presentation of ideas about memory in the context of Spanish history since the Civil War.

Tea and coffee will be available, for a small donation, and you are welcome to bring your own lunch.

Tickets are available online and on the door but due to limited places, please let us know if you are planning to buy your ticket on the door.

Description supplied by the event organiser.