SILVER

[EL ESPÍRITU DE LA COLMENA]
The spellbinding debut feature from Spanish director Víctor Erice is a masterpiece that blends history, philosophy and spirituality into richly moving allegories. A landmark film about childhood, and a dazzling treatment of a painful chapter in Spain's history, it was released in 1973 near the end of the Franco regime but set in the early 1940s, when Franco's Nationalists had just come to power following the civil war. Precocious sisters Ana, six, and Isabel, nine, live with their parents in a remote Castilian village. A traveling movie show comes to town and they go to see James Whale's horror classic FRANKENSTEIN in a makeshift theater. Isabel fools her little sister into thinking that the monster is real. When Ana discovers a wounded Republican soldier hiding in an abandoned farmhouse, she spins her own imaginative narrative combining the FRANKENSTEIN story with her barely understood notions of the recent civil war. Winner, Golden Shell, 1973 San Sebastian Film Festival. DIR/SCR/PROD Víctor Erice; SCR Ángel Fernández Santos, Francisco J. Querejeta. Spain, 1973, color, 95 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. NOT RATED

AFI Member passes accepted.