Victor Erice, one of the greatest of Spanish filmmakers, will receive a prestigious Donostia Award, given for career achievement, granted by the San Sebastian Film Festival.
The award will coincide with screening of Erice’s latest film, “Close Your Eyes” (Cerrar los Ojos), which world premiered at the Cannes Festival this May.
Few awards seem more appropriate. The statuette will be presented to Erice by Ana Torrent, on the 50th anniversary of “The Spirit of the Beehive,” Erice’s multi-levelled masterpiece, which starred the six-year-old Torrent and went on to win San Sebastian’s Gold Shell, its highest award.
It was Erice’s first feature, “Los Desafios,” a triptych anthology produced by Elías Querejeta and which a youthful Erice presented at San Sebastián in 1969, helped bring down the flag on a cinema which – compounded by “The Spirit of the Beehive” and José Luis Borau’s 1975 “Poachers,” also a Gold Shell winner – helped give San Sebastian a social issue edge as a festival which it has never abandoned.
Screening in Cannes Premiere section, “Close Your Eyes” did not achieve the impact which it deserves, prompting critics who caught the film to ask why it was passed up for main competition and sparking polemics as Erice accused the Cannes Festival at being misled into thinking that the film had been chosen for competition when he could have taken it elsewhere.
The Donostia Award, following on a North American premiere at Toronto, will serve to allow a new chance to consider a film which builds to a moving tribute to the power of cinema, despite it’s losing its uncontested status as the world’s mass pop culture, and even often being given up for dead.
The prize ceremony will be made on Friday Sept. 29 at San Sebastian’s Victoria Eugenia Theatre, the same cinema which saw the world premiere of “The Spirit of the Beehive.”
