“There are masterpieces that everyone knows and loves, and then there are the cherished gems that seem known only to a lucky few. The 1973 film, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is one such hidden treasure. The most enchanting and purest poem to childhood in modern cinema.”
– Nicolas Rapold, The New York Sun
Read full review here

“Arguably the finest and most beautifully wrought first film of the European ‘70s, a mysterious crucible as elusive, concrete, and visually primal as anything by Herzog, Straub, Olmi or Denis. BEEHIVE is a graceful and potent lyric on children’s vulnerable hunger, but it is also a sublime study on cinema’s poetic capacity.”
– Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice. Read full review here

“Gorgeously directed and photographed, and flawlessly acted… A fragile beauty!”
– V. A. Musetto, New York Post

(1973) In a tiny village on the desolate Castilian plain in 1940, young sisters Isabel Tellería and Ana Torrent eagerly carry their own chairs into the town hall for the visiting cinema truck’s screening of Frankenstein — the original Karloff version dubbed into Spanish — with the elder Isabel explaining to the rapt six-year-old Ana that the Monster is really a spirit who dons his body like it was a suit of clothes. Later they learn about anatomy in school from “Don José,” a vaguely creepy stick-on-the-organ mannequin; put their ears to the tracks to hear distant trains; explore a remote, mysterious barn; and learn from Dad to discriminate between good and deadly mushrooms. But as Mom continually cycles off to the railroad station to post emotional missives to a person unknown — and feigns sleep when much-older Dad comes to bed — and as Dad falls asleep at his desk writing up accounts of the bees he keeps and the crystal artificial hive he’s invented, Ana gets her first experiences of death, first directly but fake, then indirectly but real, and in a way conjures up her own monster/spirit. Victor Erice’s acclaimed first film was a real labor of love (but then again, with only two successors in the next three decades, they all are), simultaneously a sensitive evocation of the poignancy of childhood (notably via the phenomenal Torrent, possessed of one of the most striking pairs of eyes in cinema history) and, by implication, an elegy for the legacy of the Civil War (unmentioned, but only a year in the past from the film’s events). Haunting, elliptical and poetic, Beehive was selected in a Time Out (London) poll of directors, actors, programmers, and critics as one of the 20th century’s 100 greatest films.
A JANUS FILMS RELEASE