Veteran Spanish director Víctor Erice, best known for 1973 classic The Spirit of the Beehive, is making his first feature film in 30 years, it has been revealed.
El Diario reports that the new project, titled Cerrar los Ojos (Close Your Eyes), is being funded by Canal Sur, the public broadcaster for the Andalusia region of Spain. No information has been divulged as to its content, other than that José Coronado and María León have been cast in the lead roles, and that it is due for release in 2023.
Erice has completed only three feature films in his 50-year directing career. The Spirit of the Beehive, described by the Guardian’s Derek Malcolm as “one of the most beautiful and arresting films ever made”, is about an eight-year-old girl who finds a wounded Republican fighter hiding in a shed, and was made while the Franco regime was still in control of the country. El Sur (The South) followed in 1983, and starred Icíar Bollaín (now an award-winning director herself) as a girl whose family is living in exile in the north of Spain after the civil war. The Quince Tree Sun, released in 1992, follows the painstaking efforts of artist Antonio López García to paint a quince tree, and won the jury prize at the Cannes film festival.
Erice, now 82, has not been inactive since then, however. He contributed a segment to the 2002 short film collection Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (alongside directors including Chen Kaige, Werner Herzog and Jim Jarmusch), filmed his “letters” to Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami in the 2007 installation piece Víctor Erice–Abbas Kiarostami: Correspondences, and contributed to the 2012 omnibus film Centro Historico. El Diario reports Erice also spent years working on an adaptation of Juan Marsé’s 1993 novel The Shanghai Spell that foundered. The novel was filmed by Fernando Trueba and released in 2002.
