Víctor Erice

The Midnight Sun Film Festival is held every June in the Finnish village of Sodankylä beyond the arctic circle — where the sun never sets. Founded by Aki and Mika Kaurismäki along with Anssi Mänttäri and Peter von Bagh in 1985, the festival has played host to an international who’s who of directors and each day begins with a two-hour discussion. To mark the festival’s silver anniversary, festival director Peter von Bagh edited together highlights from these dialogues to create an epic four-part choral history of cinema drawn from the anecdotes, insights, and wisdom of his all-star cast: Coppola, Fuller, Forman, Chabrol, Corman, Demy, Kieslowski, Kiarostami, Varda, Oliveira, Erice, Rouch, Gilliam, Jancso — and 64 more. Ranging across innumerable topics (war, censorship, movie stars, formative influences, America, neorealism) these voices, many now passed away, engage in a personal dialogue across the years that’s by turns charming, profound, hilarious and moving.

In memory of the Japanese earthquake on 3.11, each director presents a 3 minute and 11 second short film in tribute to those who were lost that day.

In 1940, in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a young girl living on the Castilian plain is haunted after attending a screening of James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein and hearing from her sister that the monster is not dead, instead existing as a spirit inhabiting a nearby barn.

Ten Minutes Older is a 2002 film project consisting of two compilation feature films entitled The Trumpet and The Cello. The project was conceived by the producer Nicolas McClintock as a reflection on the theme of time at the turn of the Millennium. Fifteen celebrated film-makers were invited to create their own vision of what time means in ten minutes of film.

A woman recalls her childhood growing up in the North of Spain, focusing on her relationship with her father.

Years after his mysterious disappearance, Julio Arenas, a famous Spanish actor, is back in the news thanks to a television program.

Filmmaker Victor Erice follows Spanish artist Antonio Lopez in his painstaking attempt to paint the image of a tree.

Isabel returns to Spain, after several years of absence, to be cured of a neurosis. His daughter Ana, whom he has not seen in all this time, decides to spend the holidays with her, taking advantage of the fact that her boyfriend has gone to study in Germany. During her stay in the sanatorium, Ana meets Mario, an attractive young man somewhat unbalanced, who tries to seduce her. Although at first she does not show any interest, little by little she becomes attracted to him.

Six authorities of cinema describe their approach to transcendence, mysticism, spirituality and life after dead.

Los desafíos presents three separate stories that are linked by an American presence in Spain in the 1960s, with Dean Selmier playing the role of the American male in all three.

Documentary about director/artist Nicholas Ray and his time as a University professor

Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice talks about the first movie he probably ever saw, Roy William Neill's The Scarlet Claw (1944), starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. The remembrances of such a formative cinematic experience leads him to recall the dark days after the end of the Spanish Civil War, to confess the many fears stalking children and to reflect on the nature of memory itself.

This film project was made in 1996 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cinema.

A married woman living in France returns to Madrid to bury her father.

Filmed in 1963, but not released in Spain until 1967, the film depicts the failed romance between a bourgeois French tourist girl and a Spanish working class boy.

No description available.

In Spain, Antoñito, a child, is punished to remain standing doing the fascist salute. As an adult, turned into a young college student, he tries to free himself from the perverse amalgam of ideas, values and beliefs with which his family, the Catholic Church and the repressive elements of the Franco Regime poisoned his mind during his childhood.

Greek Theo Angelopoulos traveling from Athens to Ostia, the Roman beach where Pasolini was killed. Far from there, in a Spanish train station, Víctor Erice wanders in an interview about the film resistance. And in Italy, Tonino Guerra, Ninetto Davoli and Nico Naldini lend his voice to the missing Passolini to close a historic triangle on film and solitude.

The story of the creation of The Spirit of the Beehive, a film directed by Víctor Erice in 1973.

1940. In a rural home in northern Spain life goes on, slowly. But a blood stain on a newborn might have some deep meanings.