Víctor Erice

Karrantza, Biscay, 1940.

Every Víctor Erice movie has turned into a genuine world event. Erice studied at the Official Film School of Madrid, where he graduated with Los dias perdidos (1963). Together with José Luis Egea and Claudio Guerin, he co-directed the episodic film Los desafíos (1969). With his first solo feature film, El espíritu de la colmena (1973), winner of the Concha de Oro at the San Sebastián Film Festival, exemplified a new way of narrating a country's history through the puzzled eyes of a little girl. In his next film, The South (1983), he extended this disquieting gaze to adolescence. With El sol del membrillo (1992), Erice merited the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and he revolutionised the traditional frontiers of the cinema of the real by demonstrating the force of contemplation. This movie was chosen as the best film of the 1990s according to the votes of representatives of film archives and festivals the world over. In 2001 he made Alumbramiento , one of the episodes of the collective feature Ten Minutes Older . That same year he published the screenplay La promesa de Shanghai. In 1994 he was awarded the Spanish National Cinema Prize and in 1995 the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts. On the occasion of the exhibition Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondences, he makes the medium-length film La Morte Rouge (2006), a film soliloquy where he recreates the memory of his first cinematographic experience in what was the Casino Kursaal in San Sebastián, with resonances of the fascination for the cinema and the cruelty of the Spanish postwar period. At the 2014 Locarno Film Festival, Erice was awarded with a Golden Leopard award for lifetime achievement.