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Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” is and will always be cherished by cinephiles. After all, it beautifully captures their deep love for cinema and the art of filmmaking in the most heartfelt way. It shows a child from a small Italian town falling in love with cinema, because of his friendship with a local film projectionist. He gets to watch all kinds of movies and experiences the madness and chaos it entails. “Cinema Paradiso” opens in an era when people exclusively used film reels to make movies. The child protagonist sees the film’s material change from flammable to fire-resistant as the art advances into different eras.

The kid, Toto, grows up witnessing the changes in censorship in cinema and builds a personal connection with both sublime and obscene. Back then, films were integral to the social fabric of a community. So, he learns cinema’s importance as a medium...

The first 20 minutes of Close Your Eyes are better than almost every other movie this year, and they’re merely the memories of its main character—a ghost story written in celluloid. This prelude details a call to adventure, a request to seek out a dying rich man’s daughter...

Some five decades separate director Victor Erice’s debut film, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), and his latest, Close Your Eyes. In between these twin professional highlights, there are two other features — El Sur (1983), a work haunted by the fact that filming was halted before a key scene was shot, and the brilliant documentary Dream of Light (1992) — as well as a half dozen or so shorts and anthology contributions, video installations and several potential projects snuffed out before they could start. That first movie, however, had already secured the Spanish...

Two very different indies circling a cantor and slasher debut in moderate to wide release along with a handful of limited openings from Close Your Eyes to Paradise Is Burning on this late summer weekend with the fall festival season about to kick off.

Sony Pictures Classics launches Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane-starring Between The Temples on 576 screens. Directed by Nathan Silver, written by Silver and C. Mason Wells with Schwartzman as a cantor losing his voice, and maybe his faith. His world turns upside down when his grade school music teacher (Kane) re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student. SPC acquired the thoughtful comedy out of Sundance. Also stars Robert Smigel (Leo), Madeline Weinstein (Beach Rats), and Matthew Shear (Mistress America). It played Sundance and Berlin to strong reviews (sits at 87% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes) and made its New York debut at Tribeca.

Veteran...

"I lost my best friend, but I also lost my movie." Film Movement has revealed the official US trailer for an exceptionally great Spanish indie film titled Close Your Eyes, the first feature film in more than 30 years from an acclaimed Spanish filmmaker named Víctor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive). It first premiered last year at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, though only out of competition despite being such a strong film that many said should've been in competition. After playing at festivals all over the world all last year, FM will debut Close Your Eyes in limited US theaters end of August to start. A reflective culmination of Erice's career in film, Close Your Eyes is a haunting meditation on memory, absence, and the enduring resonance of the moving image. A Spanish actor disappears during the filming of a movie. Although he is never found, the police believe he went off a cliff.

Famed Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice has finally returned with his first solo directorial feature film in 30 years. In those intervening decades, he only made one other film, co-directed with the late Abbas Kiarostami. Now, Erice is back and making a meta statement with mystery feature “Close Your Eyes.”

The “El Sur” and “The Spirit of the Beehive” helmer directs this reflective career culmination that is set in contemporary Madrid. Watch the trailer below.

“Close Your Eyes” follows aging filmmaker Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) who is called upon to recount his memories of working on his final and still unfinished film titled “The Farewell Gaze.” During its production, the lead actor and Miguel’s close friend Julio Arenas (José Coronado) disappeared without a trace, leaving in his wake a mystery that would haunt the lives of everyone associated with the film. Miguel never directed another project, instead living a quiet life...

Harpooned by Thierry Frémaux and unceremoniously relegated to the Cannes Premiere section, the critically acclaimed Close Your Eyes will see the light of day in the U.S. After landing the #2 film on that same list in Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, The Film Movement folks continue their shopping of Spanish-language cinema with Víctor Erice’s fourth solo feature (and perhaps last outing). This was a comeback film for the The Spirit of the Beehive – his first time behind the camera in three decades.…...

It is seen as one of the greatest films ever, with the most hypnotic child performance in history. So what has Víctor Erice been doing in the half century since Beehive? As his new film Close Your Eyes hits screens, the Spanish legend reveals all

In 1972, when Ana Torrent was six years old, a man came to her school and asked her to be in his film. “He had a beard,” she recalls now, from her home in Madrid. “And I told him I didn’t like men with beards.” The director said his film was about Frankenstein’s monster and asked if she was familiar with that character. “I replied, ‘I’ve heard about him but I haven’t yet been introduced.’ That’s when he thought, ‘She’s the one.’”

The director was Víctor Erice and the film was The Spirit of the Beehive. Made at the end...

Updated: Just hours after this article was first posted, MGM+ announced it had acquired Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” and will air as a two-part docuseries on March 17 and March 24, 2024 at 9 p.m. Edt/Pdt.

It’s not too late to pick up a thoughtful gift for the people in your life, and that includes film distributors. While much of Hollywood is shutting down in advance of the holidays, plenty of cinema-loving elves are still toiling away in hopes of seeing their (very deserving) films land underneath the metaphorical tree.

And there are plenty of gifts to share, because even as the distribution landscape continues to shift and shape with startling regularity, some of the year’s most interesting and unique cinematic efforts are still looking for a home. In fact, we’ve got 18 of them wrapped and ready to go.

This holiday season,...

As 2023 draws to a close and the Oscar race begins to heat up, film publications around the world continue to roll out their lists of the year’s top films. IndieWire recently named Celine Song’s “Past Lives” the best film of the year, topping a list that also included “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer,” “Asteroid City,” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Now Cahiers du Cinema has gotten in on the action, selecting Laura Citarella’s “Trenque Lauquen” as its top pick.

The legendary French film publication, which served as an intellectual hub for the French New Wave after launching the careers of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and famously named “Twin Peaks: The Return” the best film of the 2010s, revealed its top 10 films of 2023 on Friday, December 1. The list only includes movies that opened theatrically in France in 2023, so many films that had American theatrical runs or festival premieres in past years made the cut.

Updated: While the fall festival season often plays home to the kind of films we’ve been buzzing about for quite some time (here are 36 of those very titles), the kind of features long set for “awards season potential” before they roll so much as a trailer, the sort of heavy-hitters we’re eager to keep chatting about for months and months (here are 18 in particular that we loved), there are always a wide variety of gems that arrive on the circuit still looking for homes (read: a way to reach the wider movie-going public).

This year’s season is no exception, and while the Hollywood strikes have thrown more than a few wrenches into business-as-usual, the rise of interim agreements and the need for many non-amptp distributors to bulk up their slates mean that sales should still be cooking. While Netflix has already done the bulk of this season’s buying,...

First released 50 years ago, after Francoist censors convinced themselves that its anti-authoritarian messaging would have little social impact if buried under such a “boring” art film, Victor Erice’s “The Spirit of the Beehive” follows a gullible six-year-old girl named Ana (Ana Torrent), who sees a screening of “Frankenstein” when a mobile cinema arrives in the small Castilian village where she lives with her family in the Spanish Civil War’s immediate aftermath. Confused and horrified by the sight of Frankenstein’s monster accidentally killing a child, and the townspeople then killing Frankenstein’s monster in return, Ana’s elder sister tells her that neither of those things actually happened — that everything you see in films is fake. Later, with the memories of James Whale’s movie still fresh in her mind, Ana discovers a wounded republican soldier hiding in a sheepfold and decides to treat him with kindness instead of fear.

There’s something fittingly appropriate about the way that The Spirit Of The Beehive director Victor Erice became the first Basque director to receive a lifetime achievement Donostia Award at the 71st San Sebastian Festival, while the Golden Shell for Best Film also went to San Sebastian-born Jaione Camborda for The Rye Horn, which is scripted in Galician and Portuguese. It encapsulates not just the way that the old meets the new at the festival but how, under José Luis Rebordinos’s directorship since 2011, it has continued to champion home-grown voices and non-hegemonic languages. Erice brought Close Your Eyes, his first film […]

The post The Public Experience: San Sebastian International Film Festival 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

There’s something fittingly appropriate about the way that The Spirit Of The Beehive director Victor Erice became the first Basque director to receive a lifetime achievement Donostia Award at the 71st San Sebastian Festival, while the Golden Shell for Best Film also went to San Sebastian-born Jaione Camborda for The Rye Horn, which is scripted in Galician and Portuguese. It encapsulates not just the way that the old meets the new at the festival but how, under José Luis Rebordinos’s directorship since 2011, it has continued to champion home-grown voices and non-hegemonic languages. Erice brought Close Your Eyes, his first film […]

The post The Public Experience: San Sebastian International Film Festival 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Long-awaited” isn’t quite the term for Victor Erice’s “Close Your Eyes,” a film that dedicated admirers of the Spanish master may have hoped for, but didn’t dare expect. Instead, Erice’s first feature in 31 years — and only his fourth overall — arrives as something between a desert oasis and a mirage: a shimmery, nourishing culmination of ideas and ellipses in a career so elusive as to have taken on a mythic quality, to the point that his latest feels almost dreamed into being. But “Close Your Eyes” proves a disarmingly simple, emotionally direct film once its out-of-time aura settles. A story itself of disappearance and reemergence, and the potential of cinema to bridge past and present as if decades were days, it’s potent and poignant enough to reach newcomers to Erice’s work, even as fans pore over its self-reflexive details.

Having premiered at Cannes, “Close Your Eyes...

San Sebastian — Legendary Spanish writer-director Victor Erice received a standing ovation from a packed press conference on Friday, ahead of receiving the festival’s Donostia Award tonight.

The award ceremony for San Sebastian’s accolade for career achievement follows on from the San Sebastian screening this morning of his first feature film in 30 years, “Close Your Eyes,” which, already pre-sold to France’s Haut et Court, world premiered in Cannes Premiere in May with the Basque director notably absent.

“Close Your Eyes” sparked highly positive reviews. 30 years ago, Erice won the Cannes Jury Prize for his film “Dream of Light.”

Erice fielded questions from the press on Friday before the “Close Your Eyes” team joined him on stage.

“What I achieve in my work is trying to give the best of myself,” Erice told reporters. “Fate is key in an industrial art like cinema. Fate intervenes in filmmaking, but I...

It's not a stretch to understand why films are often conflated with dreams (or nightmares); as with how our brains operate when we're asleep, films allow the creator to piece together images and sounds in a way that they hope will make sense. It allows them create something that feels the most contiguous to imagination. For a filmmaker such as Victor Erice, the great Spanish auteur who might have made very few features films, but nonetheless have made some of the most significant in Spain's (and world) film history, such as El Sur and especially The Spirit of the Beehive, it's a rare but incredible joy to see what dreams he brings to the screen. Close Your Eyes is perhaps a fitting story for someone...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

San Sebastian Fetes Veteran Director Victor Erice

Veteran director Víctor Erice will be honored with the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Donostia Award at its upcoming 71st edition, running from September 22 to 30. Actress Ana Torrent will present the Basque filmmaker with the prize at a ceremony on September 29, preceding a screening of his new film Close Your Eyes. The tribute coincides with the 50th anniversary of Erice winning San Sebastian’s top Golden Shell award for first solo feature The Spirit of the Beehive. Torrent made her big screen debut at the age of seven years old in the film and recently reunited with him in Close Your Eyes. San Sebastian has accompanied Erice across his career. Prior The Spirit of the Beehive, his 1969 directorial debut Los Desafíos, co-directed with José Luis Egea and Claudio Guerín, was selected for Official Selection and received the Silver Shell for Best Director. His...

Victor Erice, one of the greatest of Spanish filmmakers, will receive a prestigious Donostia Award, given for career achievement, at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

The award will coincide with a screening of Erice’s latest film, “Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los Ojos),” which world premiered at Cannes in May.

Few awards seem more appropriate. The statuette will be presented to Erice by Ana Torrent, on the 50th anniversary of “The Spirit of the Beehive,” Erice’s multi-leveled masterpiece, which starred a 6-year-old Torrent and went on to win San Sebastian’s Gold Shell, its highest award.

It was Erice’s first feature, “Los Desafios” — a triptych anthology produced by Elías Querejeta and presented by a youthful Erice at San Sebastián in 1969 — that helped give San Sebastian a social-issue edge which it has never abandoned, compounded by “The Spirit of the Beehive” and José Luis Borau’s 1975 film “Poachers.”

Screening in the Cannes Premiere section,...

Victor Erice, one of the most acclaimed and influential Spanish directors of all time, has made his long-awaited comeback with his new film Close Your Eyes ( Cerrar los ojos ), which premiered in the Cannes Premiere section at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on 22 May 2023.

Close Your Eyes is Erice’s first feature film in 30 years, since his 1992 docudrama The Quince Tree Sun, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes that year. Erice is also known for his classic debut The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), which is widely regarded as one of the best Spanish films ever made, and his second feature El Sur (1983), which was released as an unfinished version due to funding problems.

Close Your Eyes Clip

Close Your Eyes is a drama film that stars Manolo Solo, José Coronado, and Ana Torrent. It tells the story of Miguel Garay, an aging filmmaker and novelist who hasn’t made a movie in decades,...

One of the major cinematic events of the year was the Cannes premiere of the first film in three decades from Spanish director Víctor Erice. The nearly three-hour drama Cerrar los ojos (aka Close Your Eyes) follows a director living in retirement that returns to a mysterious past. Curiously still without U.S. distribution, hopefully the film will appear at some fall festivals but in the meantime, the first international trailer has arrived ahead of its mid-August release in France. While a French-subtitled trailer for a Spanish-language film may not be as edifying to most readers here, it’s great to see Erice back behind the camera and we’ll update if an English-subtitled version arrives.

David Katz said in his Cannes review, “Curious, self-referential, and rich, Close Your Eyes has had a difficult passageway into the world, with its Cannes world premiere dogged by reports of conflicts over its runtime,...

Erice did not attend the Cannes launch in protest at a lack of “dialogue and consultation” over its Competition omission.

New Wave Films has acquired UK-Ireland distribution rights to Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, which was the subject of a controversy over its inclusion in the Cannes Premiere section in May instead of the main Competition.

Having acquired the film from Spain-based sales agent Film Factory, New Wave is scheduling a release for early 2024.

Spanish director Erice did not attend the world premiere of his film at Cannes this year, in protest at what he considered to be a...

One of the most prized moments of Howard Hawks’ macho manifesto Rio Bravo is when Dean Martin’s Dude kicks back, gazes lightheadedly at the ceiling, and moseys into a rendition of the western ballad “My Rifle, My Pony and Me,” accompanied on guitar and harmonica with a sense of second nature by Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan. It’s an oasis of calm, of earned sentimentality, in the steeliest and most no-nonsense movie of its Hollywood era, and an emblem of the male camaraderie––sans queer shading, for sure––beloved of its most famous fans, most notably Quentin Tarantino.

Víctor Erice, however––in his first feature since a mysterious absence following 1992’s The Quince Tree Sun––has now made the ultimate homage. The centerpiece of his comeback film Close Your Eyes is its lead, melancholic filmmaker and writer Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), busting out his acoustic during a communal...

The Spirit of the Beehive director’s first feature in 30 years uses a film-within-a-film structure to ruminate on memory, ageing and cinema itself

82-year-old Spanish director Víctor Erice had previously released a total of three feature films: his classic The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973, The South in 1983 and The Quince Tree Sun in 1992. Now here is Close Your Eyes, co-written by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, whose title could be taken to indicate a farewell. We can only hope not. It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives. And it is also about cinema, which helps to promote memory and retrieve that which has vanished, even as it is itself in danger of being forgotten. Close Your Eyes could even...

Spanish director expresses disappointement it was not programmed in Competition after turning down an offer from Directors’ Fortnight.

Spanish director Victor Erice, whose film Close Your Eyes is screening in Cannes Premiere, has published an open letter in Spain’s El País newspaper explaining that he is not in Cannes personally as he is disappointed by the decision of delegate general Thierry Fremaux to not programme the film in the main Competition.

Erice said he wanted to put the record straight after reading a report in El Pais that the film was not selected for Competition because it was not ready in time.

It’s been 31 years since the great Spanish auteur Victor Erice made his last feature-length film, and as Cannes topper Thierry Frémaux pointed out during a brief introduction to the 82-year-old director’s long-awaited return to the screen, Close Your Eyes (Cerrar Los Ojos), that beats a record previously set by Terrence Malick.

As amusing as Frémaux’s anecdote was, he may have to one day explain why he chose to program such a graceful and powerful tribute to cinema in his festival’s catch-all “Cannes Première” sidebar instead of the main competition, for Close Your Eyes is a consummate work of filmmaking by a major artist.

Slowly but deliberately paced, the movie builds to a crescendo in a closing act where a movie itself — a real movie shot and projected on celluloid — plays a pivotal role, resuscitating forgotten lives and memories as only the cinema can do. Erice has managed,...

“20,000 Species of Bees,” (Estibaliz Urresola)

One of the big winners at Berlin, taking Leading Performance, and now racking up healthy sales, the story of a family off for a village summer holiday which builds to a moving ode to women’s freedoms. Sales: Luxbox

“21 Paraíso,” (Nestor Ruiz Medina)

Living in an idyllic Andalusia, a couple in love grapples with the realities of making a living through OnlyFans. Screened at Seville and Tallinn. Sales: Begin Again Films.

“All the Names of God,” (Daniel Calparsoro)

One of the big Spanish action-thrillers hitting this Cannes market, from a specialist (“Sky High”). Pre-sold to France (Kinovista), Germany and Italy (Koch Media) with Tripictures releasing in Spain. Sales: Latido

“Un amor,” (Isabel Coixet)

The multi-prized Coixet (“The Secret Life of Words”).

directs Goya winner Laia Costa (“Lullaby”) in a village-set study of an isolated woman’s succumbing to devouring passion. Sales: Film Constellation.

“Ashes in the Sky,...

Veteran Spanish actor Ana Torrent was around five-years-old when she was cast in her first movie, the landmark drama The Spirit of the Beehive, by maverick filmmaker Víctor Erice.

Fifty years later, the pair have reunited on a new pic, Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos), Erice’s first feature-length film in over a decade. The film debuts Out-of-Competition in the Cannes Premiere section on Monday.

The film follows a famous Spanish actor, Julio Arenas, who disappears while shooting a film. Although his body is never found, the police conclude that he’s been the victim of an accident by the sea. Many years later, the mystery surrounding his disappearance is brought back into the spotlight by a TV show outlining his life and death, showing exclusive images of the last scenes he filmed, shot by his dear friend, the director Miguel Garay.

On paper, the 76th Cannes Film Festival looks like an embarrassment of riches, assembling no shortage of big guns in terms of major-name filmmakers.

Pretty much every list of hotly anticipated titles will be topped by Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, an epic Western crime drama based on David Grann’s nonfiction book about the murder of Indigenous Americans on tribal land in 1920s Oklahoma. Likewise, it seems redundant to include Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, given the legions of fans already jostling to watch Harrison Ford crack the whip one last time in James Mangold’s conclusion of the beloved action-adventure franchise.

New works from celebrated filmmakers are simply too numerous to cram into a rundown of just ten titles, so their absence here should not be misinterpreted as lack of interest.

That includes Ken Loach’s story of tensions caused by the arrival...

It’s the most exciting time of the year: the Cannes Film Festival is set to kick off next week, taking place May 16-27. Ahead of festivities we’ve rounded up what we’re most looking forward to, and while we’re sure many surprises await, per every year, one will find 20 films that should be on your radar. Check out our picks below and be sure to subscribe to our daily newsletter for the latest updates from the festival.

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

While it’s been five long years since the latest film from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, we did get a recent re-release of his stellar breakout feature Uzak aka Distant, but it’s now finally time for a new film from the Turkish director. Les herbes sèches (aka About Dry Grasses) clocks in at familiarly epic length (3 hours and 17 minutes) and follows Samet, a young...

There are not many directors who have amassed such a rich contribution to the world of cinema amongst so few films as Víctor Erice. The 82-year-old Spanish director broke out with 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive, followed by El Sur in 1983 and The Quince Tree Sun in 1992. Now he’s finally set to return with his first feature in over thirty years. Cerrar los ojos (aka Close Your Eyes) takes a meta approach, following a director living in retirement that returns to a mysterious past. Ahead of a premiere at Cannes Film Festival, the first clip and new images have now arrived for the film, which clocks in at 169 minutes.

Here’s the synopsis: “A famous Spanish actor, Julio Arenas, disappears while shooting a film. Although his body is never found, the police conclude that he’s been the victim of an accident by the sea. Many years later,...

Above: Spanish poster by José María Cruz Novillo for The Garden of Delights.When the great Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura died in February at the age of 90, I searched through his posters to find a suitable piece to post as a tribute and came across several very stylized, diagrammatic designs for his early ’70s films. They turned out to be the work of José María Cruz Novillo, an artist I surprisingly hadn't been aware of previously, but who, I have since found out, is a titan of Spanish graphic design.Above: José María Cruz Novillo (right) with his son Pepe in front of a wall of his film posters. Photo: Fernando Sánchez.Cruz Novillo, who is still working at the age of 86 (in partnership with his architect son Pepe), could rightfully be called the Saul Bass of Spain. Like Bass, he excels in both film marketing and logo design. Since...

While we’ve known the results of Jeanne Dielman Tops Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Greatest Films of All-Time List”>Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll for a few months now, the recent release of the individual ballots has given data-crunching cinephiles a new opportunity to dive deeper. We have Letterboxd lists detailing all 4,400+ films that received at least one vote and another expanding the directors poll, spreadsheets calculating every entry, and now a list ranking how many votes individual directors received for their films.

Tabulated by Genjuro, the list of 35 directors, with two pairs, puts Alfred Hitchcock back on top, while Chantal Akerman is at number two. Elsewhere in the top ten are David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick, and tied for the tenth spot is Wong Kar Wai and Ingmar Bergman.

Check out the list below,...

Spain boasts a bullish presence at the Berlinale. Following, short profiles of its features that have made the festival cut and a selection of top titles being moved at the European Film Market:

20,000 Species Of Bees

Director: Estíbaliz Urresola

Spain’s Berlin competition player is from Urresola, director of Cannes Critics’ Week short “Chords.” Film takes place in a Basque Country village and is a celebration of female sexual diversity. Catalonia’s Inicia Films (“La Maternal”) produces with Gariza Films (“Nora”).

Sales: Luxbox

21 PARAÍSO

Director: Nestor Ruiz Medina

A couple in love grapples with the realities of making a living through OnlyFans. Set in an Andalusian idyll, a rich portrait of the challenges of love. Screened at Seville and Tallinn.

Sales: Begin Again Films.

Anqa

Director: Helin Celik

A Forum doc feature from Vienna-based Kurd Celik, the films tells the harrowing story of three Jordanian women, survivors of male near-fatal violence.

Over the past 20 years or so, a surfeit of arthouse titles and an older demographic turning away from theaters have worn away at the sales of non-English language films.

Currently, cinema across the world, and especially arthouse, is stuck between a rock — global streamers often paying less, striking fewer worldwide deals and buying fewer finished movies — and a hard place: a pandemic-drained theatrical business for all but a few tentpoles.

“A few years ago, even if a film wasn’t perfect and had limited festival play, it sold at least a little,” says Film Factory founder Vicente Canales. “Now, either a film works, and sells pretty much the world, or it doesn’t work at all.”

Yet Spain’s top sales agents remain broadly optimistic about the future.

For one thing, some films do still do business, led by new titles from star auteurs that have A-festival play, such as...

Paris-based Haut et Court has closed French distribution rights with sales agent Film Factory Entertainment on Victor Erice’s ”Close Your Eyes” (“Cerrar los ojos”), the legendary Spanish director’s return to feature film direction 30 years after Cannes Jury Prize winner “Dream of Light” and a half century on from his milestone debut, “The Spirit of the Beehive.”

“Beehive” is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest Spanish films ever made. “Light” was chosen by the world’s cinematheques as the best film of the 1990s. “Close Your Eyes” reunites Erice with Ana Torrent, a wide-eyed mite in “Beehive.”

One of the most awaited Spanish films of 2023, it will be released in Spain by Avalon Films, the producer-distributor of “Alcarràs.”

“Close Your Eyes” turns on a famed actor who disappears while making a film. Many years later, a TV program airs the final scenes he shot, the beginning...

Festival will also host tributes to Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang and late director Shinji Aoyama.

US director Julie Taymor is to preside over the international competition jury of Tokyo International Film Festival, which has also announced plans to revive the Akira Kurosawa Award and host tribute screenings to Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang and late Japanese director Shinji Aoyama.

The festival has unveiled highlights of its 35th edition, which will run October 24 to November 2, ahead of the announcement of its full line up on September 21.

Taymor is known for directing features such as Frida, Titus, Across The Universe and The Glorias...

Veteran film, theater and opera director Julie Taymor has been set as the president of the competition jury at next month’s Tokyo International Film Festival.

Taymor (“The Lion King”) will head a small group that selects the winners from the 15 competition titles that unspool in Tokyo between Oct. 24 and Nov. 2, 2022. The other four members of the jury will be announced later.

Taymor is the second woman to head the jury in as many years and follows Isabelle Huppert in 2021. There was no competition in 2020 due to Covid. And in 2019, the jury was headed by China’s Zhang Ziyi.

The Kurosawa Akira Award is to be revived after also being put on hiatus since 2008. The award will be presented to a filmmaker who “is making extraordinary contributions to world cinema and is expected to help define the film industry’s future.” Previous recipients have included Steven Spielberg, Yamada Yoji and Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

Norwegian filmmaker Eskil Vogt had quite a 2021, bringing both his most recent collaboration with Joachim Trier, The Worst Person in the World (for which he would go on to be Oscar-nominated), and his latest directorial effort, The Innocents, to Cannes.

Now getting a release this week via IFC Midnight, his grounded supernatural drama follows four children over a summer holiday as they discover abilities that lead down dark, strange paths. With a unique perspective told through the point-of-view of the children, Vogt crafts a haunting tale of morality.

Ahead of the film’s release, I spoke with Vogt about working with his young cast, reactions from parents, sharing a title with the Jack Clayton classic, inspirations as far-ranging from David Cronenberg to The Spirit of the Beehive to manga, Joachim Trier’s advice, and more.

The Film Stage: You pull off quite a difficult balance with this film, working with...

Moviegoing Memories is a series of short interviews with filmmakers about going to the movies. Tatiana Huezo's Prayers for the Stolen is Mubi Go's Film of the Week in the UK for April 8, 2022. Notebook: How would you describe your movie in the least amount of words?Tatiana Huezo: A look at the world from the discovery and magic of being a girl. A look that also immerses us in the fear that comes from understanding the violence to which you are exposed.Notebook: Where and what is your favourite movie theatre? Why is it your favorite?Huezo: The Cineteca Nacional in Mexico reminds me of my childhood. I feel melancholy and emotional every time I go to one of its screens, especially the big ones.When I was a child, I fell in love with cinema in front of one of those screens. I found some of the...

Koji Fukada was born in Tokyo in 1980. In love with European cinema, he is very influenced by Marcel Carné and Victor Erice. While studiyng Litterature at the Taisho University, he took lessons of cinema direction at the Tokyo Film School, where one of his teacher was Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Fukada directed his first feature film in 2001, “The Chair”. In 2020, he is back with “The Real Thing”, based on the comic by Mochiru Hoshisato, and presented as a premiere in Vesoul, in two parts.

On the occasion of his presence in Fica Vesoul, we speak with him about rewatching his older films, his preference between Japanese and French cinema, the effect theater had on his filmmaking, Kanji Furutachi and Bryerly Long, and many other topics.

Translation by Lea Le Dimna

This morning, you watched “Human Comedy in Tokyo”, a film you shot in 2008. How does that make you feel?

It does not...

AMC Networks genre streamer Shudder has dropped a first trailer for U.K.’s writer-director Ruth Platt’s “Martyrs Lane.” A tragic ghost story, the feature world premieres today at Canada’s Fantasia Festival before being released on Shudder on Sept. 9.

One day after its Fantasia bow, “Martyrs Lane” receives its U.K. premiere on Aug. 20 at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

A ghost story, yes – but one built on the pain of a child whose bedrock parental relation fails her – “Martyrs Lane” turns on Leah, 10, left to her own devices in a rambling vicarage.

Her mother’s too busy by day and distraught at night to attend much to her. Something is clearly wrong. Investigating why her mother sleeps clasping a golden locket, Leah begins to be visited by a cherubic-looking little girl wearing tawdry angel’s wings.

Drawing deep on a humanistic tradition of family relationship-driven films led by...

“Martyrs Lane,” the third feature from Ruth Platt (“The Lesson”), hits Fantasia with a double momentum: Bullish word of mouth, and a recent sale to AMC Networks genre streamer Shudder for North America, U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

Produced by London’s Ipso Facto Productions, whose credits take in “Irina Palm” and Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Valhalla Rising,” the LevelK sales title is a ghost story but, like the best of that kind, much more.

Leah, 10, lives in a rambling vicarage with her parents and haughty older sister. But something’s very wrong. Her mother, who sleeps clasping a golden locket, hardly has any time for her. One morning, Leah spots the locket left on the bathroom shelf. She opens it, and steals what she finds inside, sparking the nightly visits of a cherubic looking little girl, sporting shabby angel wings.

“Martyr’s Lane” is described as an...

In the arid, lunar landscape of Ainhoa Rodríguez’s Destello Bravío, a whole village waits for things to fall apart. We’re in the rural outskirts of Spain’s Extremadura region, a few miles from the border with Portugal, but the hamlet remains unnamed—it juts into being from a fable, a land of almost biblical desolation and solitude. The old folks marooned here are the last surviving members of an old species, but the film is so committed to its oneiric and sepulchral fabric that they may as well be dead already. Ghosts in a ghost town. In a tale that draws so much of its perturbing allure from its relationship with the supernatural, it’s fitting that watching Destello Bravío should carry a kind of cosmic quality—like watching a dead star flicker, knowing the source of the light you see died a long, long time ago.

For...

This quality in this year’s crop of home-grown productions at the San Sebastian Festival is no surprise to anyone following the region’s growth in recent years, but it is impressive.

Below, 20 Basque projects and finished films and series which stand out at this year’s event.

“Akelarre,” (Pablo Agüero)

A former San Sebastian Festival Co-Production Forum project, “Akelarre” is the latest from Cannes Jury Prize-winner Pablo Agüero (“First Snow”) and plays in this year’s main competition. Heavily influenced by Jules Michelet’s novel “The Witch,” Agüero’s period drama came from a “feeling of injustice that almost all works of fiction dealing with witch hunts perpetuate, clichés first created by the Inquisition.” Seven companies combined on the ambitious co-production.

S.A. Film Factory

“Patria,” (Aitor Gabilondo)

HBO Europe’s original series about two families caught up in the Basque Country’s armed conflict with the Eta organization,...

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

From the moment a blue Volkswagen Beetle is consumed by a fireball on the edge of a sprawling beach, director Blitz Bazawule’s 2018 “The Burial of Kojo” announces a striking vision of beauty in disarray. The New York-based Ghanian musician-turned-filmmaker’s debut follows a young girl growing up in the shadow of her troubled family, trying to make sense of her father’s dark past through haunting visions and enigmatic bursts of sorrow. Even when the story turns on blunt metaphors, it maintains an absorbing lyrical foundation. It’s one of the great modern fairy tales of recent years, less hindered by its rough edges than enhanced by them.

The saga of Esi is a familiar sort of supernatural coming-of-age story, in...

Brazilian “The Father’s Shadow” is one of those occasional arthouse quasi-horror films, like “The Spirit of the Beehive” or Aussie “Celia,” in which the supernatural elements seem a poetical extension of a child protagonist’s distress at the inexplicable realities of the adult world. Recipient of a special jury prize (as well as an acting nod to its young lead) at Fantasia, Gabriela Amaral’s sophomore feature could parlay critical acclaim into offshore distribution beyond the festival circuit. Not entirely satisfying, it’s nonetheless a curiously poignant fable of profound premature loss, both enhanced and somewhat muddled by its slippery occult elements.

Nine-year-old Dalva radiates a sullen suspicion that’s off-puttingly unusual for her age. But she has good reason for resentment: Her mother has recently died, and father Jorge (Julio Machado) is not coping well, to say the least. When not toiling at a toxic Sao Paolo building job he hates,...

SeryozhaAlong with Eldar Ryazanov and Leonid Gaidai, Georgiy Daneliya, now 88, is one of the greatest comic filmmakers of the Soviet era. He describes his own genre as “sad comedy,”expertly balancing a warmhearted approach to characterization with a certain melancholy undertow. Yet, with his work never distributed outside of the Eastern Bloc, except for Finland, and in the case of Kin-dza-dza! (1986), Japan, he is more deserving than any other Soviet director of critical reappraisal. Soviet comedies in general, and Daneliya's comedies in particular, are often characterized by a certain naïveté, yet a simplicity in approach shouldn’t be confused with simple-mindedness. Instead, like in an Yasujiro Ozu movie, this plainness becomes a style in itself, a way of strengthening a story though seeming to do less. Slyly subverting the demands of a state-run studio system, this naïve approach allowed Daneliya's complex characterizations to nest themselves matryoshka doll-like inside superficially straightforward stories.

Since his 2006 breakthrough feature The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, anime director Mamoru Hosoda has delighted audiences across barriers of age, gender and nationality with his brightly animated, colorful fantasies. Collaborating for years with the prestigious Studio Madhouse to produce industry-leading digital 2D animation in subsequent films such as Summer Wars and Wolf Children, Hosoda expanded in 2011 to his own Studio Chizu, directing, writing and producing animated features entirely under his own jurisdiction and fully establishing him as an industry heavyweight.

His family-friendly yet sometimes bittersweet tales of magic, science fiction, and modern life are rich with crowd-pleasing sentimentality, romance, and spectacle, but behind this populist predilection exists a painstaking formal command of the medium which has warranted comparisons with the auteurs of Studio Ghibli and even whispers of Oscar consideration (a Hollywood insiders’ circle no Japanese animator without the supporting PR muscle of Disney has thus far been able...

On the radio that hums in the background, there’s a report of seven whales who, in an apparent act of mass suicide, have washed ashore not far from the sunbaked Chilean nowheresville where “Oblivion Verses” takes place. Rescue efforts are underway, but in the end, only one of the pod is successfully returned to the sea. So later, there’s a question hidden in the strikingly poetic image of a whale flying through the pale sky over the head of our old-man hero. Is it the one whale who lived, perhaps feeling an affinity for a man who has made it his late-life mission similarly to “save” one person from oblivion, amid so many others who were lost? Or is it one of the whales who died, beckoning the old man and all his razor-wire memories to his final rest?

As with so much in this beautiful and strange...