Criterion is proud to present Víctor Erice’s spellbinding The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), 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.
- NTSC Region 1
- Anamorphic Widescreen
- Spanish with New and improved English subtitle translation
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- The Footprints of a Spirit, a documentary featuring director Víctor Erice, producer Elías Querejeta, coscreenwriter Ángel Fernández-Santos, and actor Ana Torrent
- Víctor Erice in Madrid, an interview with the director
- Interviews with film scholar Linda Ehrlich and actor Fernando Fernán Gómez
- A new essay by film scholar Paul Julian Smith
