Ana Torrent

While doing a thesis about violence, Angela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student in her faculty...

Carlos Saura’s exquisite Cría cuervos . . . heralded a turning point in Spain: shot while General Franco was on his deathbed, the film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy of fascism and its effects on a middle-class family (the title derives from the Spanish proverb: “Raise ravens and they’ll peck out your eyes”). Ana Torrent (the dark-eyed beauty from The Spirit of the Beehive) portrays the disturbed eight-year-old Ana, living in Madrid with her two sisters and mourning the death of her mother, whom she conjures as a ghost (an ethereal Geraldine Chaplin). Seamlessly shifting between fantasy and reality, the film subtly evokes both the complex feelings of childhood and the struggles of a nation emerging from the shadows.

Criterion is proud to present Víctor Erice’s spellbinding THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (EL ESPÍRITU DE LA COLMENA), widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian village in 1940, in the wake of the country’s devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. Produced as Franco’s long regime was nearing its end, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is a bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made.

Marking his first feature film after a gap of 31 years, this latest triumph from Spanish master Víctor Erice trails after a mysterious disappearance. A sublime meditation on the moving relationship between cinema and memory, Close Your Eyes ponders the permanence of art against the wheels of time.

Madrid, 1991. A teen girl finds herself besieged by an evil supernatural force after she played Ouija with two classmates.