Víctor Erice, quatro filmes em cinquenta anos que ainda ecoam

Víctor Erice

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Nascimento	30 de junho de 1940 Karrantza, Biscay, Spain
Ocupação	Cineasta
Conhecido por	O Espírito da Colméia, O Sul, Fechar os Olhos
Prêmios	Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival 1992 (El sol del membrillo) · Golden Leopard lifetime achievement, Locarno 2014 · Donostia Award, San Sebastián 2023 · Laceno d'Oro lifetime achievement, 2025

When Close Your Eyes premiered at Cannes in May 2023, Víctor Erice had not made a feature film in thirty-one years. What followed — the standing ovations, the Donostia lifetime achievement award at San Sebastián, second place on Cahiers du Cinéma’s year-end list — confirmed what the long silence had always implied: that Erice operates on a different clock than the rest of cinema. The question his career perpetually raises is not what he will make next, but whether what he is making is truly necessary.

He was born in Karrantza, a small valley municipality in the Basque province of Biscay, in 1940, in the first years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. His route to filmmaking was circuitous: law, political science, and economics at the University of Madrid, followed by film direction studies at the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía in 1963. Before shooting a single frame of his own, he spent years writing film criticism for Nuestro Cine, the Spanish journal that shaped a generation of cinephile directors forced to work under censorship — learning, in part, how to see clearly in a country where clarity was dangerous.

His first feature, El espíritu de la colmena (1973), arrived under those conditions. On the surface, it follows Ana, a young girl in a remote Castilian village who becomes obsessed with Frankenstein after watching the James Whale film, and begins searching for the monster in the fields. What it actually did was encode the trauma of the Civil War and the silence of the early Franco years into the gaze of a child who cannot understand what she sees. Ana Torrent, six years old in the film and making her acting debut, became one of Spanish cinema’s most enduring presences. The film is still considered one of the greatest Spanish works ever committed to celluloid — not least because it said, in 1973, what nothing in Spain could openly say.

A decade later, El sur (1983) should have been the full arc of a story taken from Adelaida García Morales’ novella: a young girl’s attempt to understand her father’s melancholy and his obsession with the south of Spain. But producer Elías Querejeta ran out of funding, or patience, and only allowed Erice to film the first two-thirds of the script. The result, released unfinished, starred Omero Antonutti and is both one of the most poignant films in the Spanish canon and one of its most discussed wounds — a work of such piercing beauty in its truncated form that critics have spent decades arguing whether the missing section was ever truly necessary, or whether the incompleteness is itself the film’s meaning.

El sol del membrillo (1992), his only documentary, extended this patience into something almost meditative. He spent months filming painter Antonio López García as López attempted to capture the light falling on a quince tree in his Madrid garden before the season changed. The film won the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 1992. It also marked what neither Erice nor anyone watching knew would be the last feature film he directed for thirty-one years.

What followed that silence is one of contemporary cinema’s most scrutinized absences. Erice continued working — short films, commissioned pieces, a remarkable collaborative exhibition with Abbas Kiarostami in which the two directors exchanged films and letters (2006), and a segment for the Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet anthology (2002) alongside Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, and Wim Wenders. None of this constitutes the withdrawal it is sometimes called. But the absence of a new feature raised harder questions: about the Spanish film industry’s appetite for the particular cinema Erice makes, about whether a director whose three features averaged one every decade and a half can survive in an industry that rewards productivity. It also raised a more uncomfortable question about Spain’s relationship with its own best directors — one that arrived with full force when it became clear that in four decades of Goya Awards, the Spanish Film Academy had never given Erice an honorary Goya de Honor. The omission remains a live controversy in Spanish cinema circles.

Cerrar los ojos (2023) addressed all of this without answering any of it. The film follows a director trying to trace the disappearance of an actor who vanished during the filming of an unfinished movie decades earlier. Ana Torrent — the child of El espíritu de la colmena — appears as the missing man’s daughter: now an adult, facing a reckoning with a vanished past. The film is about cinema, about memory, about the impossibility of recovering what time has taken. It is also, unmistakably, a director’s meditation on his own long absence from the screen. It won Best Film at the Carmen Awards, Best Director and Best Screenplay at the CEC Awards, and a Goya for Best Supporting Actor for José Coronado. It was preselected by Spain for the Oscar for Best International Film.

The international record of recognition is more consistent than the domestic one. Erice received the Golden Leopard for lifetime achievement at Locarno in 2014, the Donostia Award at San Sebastián in 2023, and in 2025 the Laceno d’Oro lifetime achievement award at the festival’s fiftieth edition, where he held masterclasses and presented a retrospective of his complete work to audiences and filmmakers who had spent careers studying what he had made.

At eighty-four, the question of whether there will be a fifth feature is the one his audience always carries. Given his record, the answer is not given. But given his record, it is also not closed — and the specific weight of that uncertainty has itself, by now, become part of what cinema understands when it tries to understand what necessity means.