El sur 1983
Ten years after making his mark on Spanish cinema with The Spirit of the Beehive, Victor Erice returned to filmmaking with this adaptation of a novella by Adelaida Garcia Morales, which deepens the director’s fascination with childhood, fantasy, and the legacy of his country’s civil war.

El Sur has the voice of Estrella (Maria Massip) tell us the story of her childhood, in particular her relationship with her father Agustin (Omero Antonutti) who disappeared from her life when she was 15. We spend most of the film in the late 1950's when Estrella is 8 though (and played by Sonsoles Aranguren). At this time she adores her father. He's an unusual man who practises divination, but, having grown up with this strange behaviour all her life, Estrella sees him as completely normal. As the flashbacks move forward we see Agustin grow more distant and haunted by the love of a former partner, but Estrella doesn't understand what's happening to him or how much he needs help. Only when she becomes a teenager (and played by Iciar Bollain) does she seem to guess what went wrong and realise that even though he showed great love to her, he was never open or honest, so she never got to actually know him as a person or help him with his problems, to create a true bond between them.

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