Víctor Erice

Víctor Erice Aras (Spanish: [eˈɾiθe]; born 30 June 1940) is a Spanish film director.

He studied law, political science, and economics at the University of Madrid. He also attended the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografia in 1963 to study film direction. He wrote film criticism and reviews for the Spanish film journal Nuestro Cine, and made a series of short films before making his first feature film, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), a critical portrait of the rural Spain of the 1940s.

Ten years later, Erice wrote and directed The South (1982), based on a story from Adelaida García Morales, considered a masterpiece although the producer Elías Querejeta only allowed him to film the first two-thirds of the story. His third movie, The Quince Tree Sun (1992) is a documentary about painter Antonio López García. The film won the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival.

He was a member of the jury at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival in May.

Critics

Geoff Andrew, in the Time Out Film Guide, praises Erice's contribution to Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (Lifeline) as "quite masterly", adding "it only makes you wish he worked more frequently". Excluding that short film, he has produced only three major works: The Spirit of the Beehive (1973, El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive), El Sur (1983, The South) and El Sol del Membrillo (1992, The Quince Tree Sun). Critic Tony Rayns describes The Spirit of the Beehive as "a haunting mood piece that dispenses with plot and works its spells through intricate patterns of sound and image" and of El Sur it has been said that "Erice creates his film as a canvas, conjuring painterly images of slow dissolves and shafts of light that match Caravaggio in their power to animate a scene of stillness, or freeze one of mad movement".