50 years after he won the Golden Shell for his first solo feature film, The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), filmmaker Víctor Erice will receive a Donostia Award at the 71st edition of the San Sebastian Festival. The Festival pays tribute to a filmmaker who, with only four feature films to his name, has garnered the Silver Shell for Best Director, Golden Shell for Best Film and the Jury and International Film Critics Prizes at the Festival de Cannes, among many other distinctions.
Following the Donostia Award gala, the Festival will show his latst film Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos), a film about memory woven around an unfinished film and the mysterious disappearance of an actor. The actress Ana Torrent, who starred in The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena) at the age of 6, and once again works with Erice in Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos), will present the filmmaker with the statuette.
Víctor Erice’s career has always intersected with the San Sebastian Festival. His directorial debut, filming one of the three episodes of Los desafíos (1969) with José Luis Egea and Claudio Guerín, was selected for the Official Selection and received the Silver Shell for Best Director. Four years later, with his first solo feature, The Spirit of Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena)(1973), he was acknowledged with the Golden Shell. Dream of Light )El sol del membrillo)(1992) was selected for the Made in Spain section, after receiving the Jury and International Film Critics’ Prizes in Cannes, while the anthology film Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet screened in Zabaltegi in 2002.
Past winners of Donostia Awards include Agnès Varda (2017), Hirokazu Kore-eda (2018), Costa-Gavras (2019) and David Cronenberg (2022).
CLOSE YOUR EYES (CERRAR LOS OJOS)
Víctor Erice (SPAIN)
Country(ies) of production: Spain – Argentina
Cast: Manolo Solo, Jose Coronado, Ana Torrent, Petra Martínez, María León, Mario Pardo, Helena Miquel, Antonio Dechent, José María Pou, Soledad Villamil, Juan Margallo, Venecia Franco
A famous Spanish actor, Julio Arenas, vanishes during a movie shoot. Although his body is never found, the police conclude that he had some kind of an accident on the seashore. Several years down the line, this mystery of sorts returns to front page news when a TV program looking back at the actor shows exclusive images of the last scenes in which he participated, filmed by his close friend, the director Miguel Garay..