El Sur is Victor Erice consecutive second triumph as a excellent and meticulous director after a ten years period of cinema inactivity that he spend doing television commercials spots to get some money. Based on Adelaida Garcia Morales homonym tale, the film is a cadenced story about a little girl who we see growing up in the screen. Estrella (Sonsoles Aranguren at 8 and Iciar Bollain at 15) reminds the relationship with her strange father, a blue republican medicine doctor in a northern little and still village of Spain at the fifties. The picture was show with success at 1983 Cannes Festival of Cinema but, made off current cinema fashions, did not won the Academy Oscar to Best Foreign Film. I think it deserved to receive the prize. In spite of disagreements with the movie producer (the original picture must to be very much longer) Erice got a delightful, evocative and unique piece of wok with a quite and maintained rhythm and wonderful outside and interior photography. Any way El Sur is the most personal and powerful Spanish film ever made.
Review of El Sur
