A young girl comes of age amid the long silences and shadows of her family’s wintry northern exile in Erice’s long-awaited follow-up to The Spirit of the Beehive, which continues that work’s exploration of childhood fantasies and adult realities in a similarly hushed, becalmed tone. In the solitude of her parents’ northern home, a young daughter seeks the secrets that the south—and the past—hold. Politics, the Spanish Civil War, the breaking of family ties, or illicit loves: all seem possible in her father’s ever-growing sadness, and her mother’s deepening sighs. A Rembrandt painting come to life, El Sur is a work of muted colors and hushed tones, where a life worth living already seems to have come and gone. “A film of love and sorrow suffused with an appreciation of life’s beauty” (LA Times), El Sur tracks a nation’s and a generation’s divide. 

—Jason Sanders