Yesterday was the big day for a Víctor Erice who returned with magnificence to the Sant Sebastià festival 50 years after winning the Concha d'Or for El espíritu de la colmena, his first feature film. And he did it to receive at the Victoria Eugenia theater a well-deserved Donostia award that he collected from Ana Torrent, the girl with the iconic look who fell in love with the public at the age of seven in that instant classic set in post-war Spain, which returns to stand in front of Erice's delicate camera in his new work, Cerrar los ojos, which was screened after the tribute to the Basque filmmaker and has been available since yesterday at the box office. Hours earlier, the elusive and shy Erice, a man who usually runs away from the press, shared concerns and memories in a meeting with journalists in which he was applauded for a long time. With only four feature films, he has forged a reputation as a cult filmmaker who is surrounded by an aura of mystery, but he brings iron to the subject. "I don't recognize myself in the promotion of films, I know that I become an important element, but things are explained in a different way to how I have experienced it. I don't want to offend anyone, but I'm suspicious of the epic legend around my figure."
Cerrar los ojos means his long-awaited return to the big screen more than three decades after El sol del membrillo, about the process of the work of the painter Antonio López. The desire to shoot again arises from "the most conventional of needs, the reproduction of existence". Starring Manolo Solo, José Coronado and Ana Torrent, it is a great film about identity and memory that was acclaimed in May during its passage to the Cannes festival, a competition that Erice decided to plant due to the lack of dialogue with its director, Thierry Frémaux. And it is quite an ode to the seventh art and its healing process. "I think that the subject of healing is one of the virtues of art and we could circumscribe this to those books, paintings, music and films that suddenly burst into our lives and change us. After going through this experience we feel different, somehow. Art as a healer was the fundamental claim of one of the greatest Basque artists... Jorge Oteiza”, he pointed out with emotion – hidden behind his sunglasses – when he spoke of his dead friend. According to Erice, despite the fact that many critics have called his new creation nostalgic, he denies it. Nor does it have anything testamentary, because "if I admit this, I have no other life horizon than the wax museum, retirement or the cemetery".
The director of El sur didn't exactly have kind words for the platforms. "Of the original project of the Lumière brothers, only the cinema remains; films are produced, made and distributed differently. Now only the room remains as a residue", he lamented. And he defended that "a real film claims the movie theater as the absolute medium, but big corporations have the tendency to take over all the windows". He spoke of his love for a cinema "that has given me and the people of my generation in times of misery and lack of freedom a few hours in which we were citizens of the world. And we could choose our teachers, filmmakers who didn't consider themselves artists". The 83-year-old filmmaker also vindicated his other facets in the world of short films, video installations or giving workshops to young directors. "Outside the audiovisual framework, in which only feature films are counted, there is life, true life".
