Víctor Erice. 1973
In the 1940s, at the height of the Franco regime, a traveling cinema arrives in a small village in Segovia, on the Castilian plateau. They screen Frankenstein, a film that deeply impacts Ana, a six-year-old girl. This moment marks the beginning of a journey that will lead her to discover her own self.
Driven by the restlessness and fascination sparked by the monster’s irruption into the apparent placidity of her environment—the deformed, wretched being, whose misery the world mistakes for evil—Ana asks her older sister, Isabel (eight), who the monster is. Her sister tells her the monster is a spirit. Unable to curb her urge to know the truth about this spirit, Ana learns from her sister that it is everywhere and appears unexpectedly in any form—just as it did to the girl who wanted to play with it by the lake. This leads to Ana’s fundamental question, her confrontation with the irremediable: "Why does the spirit kill the girl?" Isabel’s response is ambiguous. After hearing a scream, Ana runs to her sister’s room to find her "dead"—though it is merely a ruse to frighten her. Isabel then tells her that everything in the cinema is a lie: the girl is not killed, and neither is the monster.
Ana must embark on the path toward the spirit alone, invoking it by closing her eyes in bed and whispering, "I am Ana," waiting for it to appear. She soon intuits that the spirit can only be found outside her family and familiar surroundings—outside the hive. For the spirit is the spirit of the hive—the spirit’s misery is nothing but the misery of the hive, its lack of meaning—which must be banished and destroyed to survive. Her father, the beekeeper and guardian of the hive, shows her how to do this, teaching her to distinguish edible mushrooms from poisonous ones and furiously crushing a poisonous one with his boot.
In her search for the spirit, Ana reaches an abandoned house on the outskirts of the village. There, she encounters a first face of the spirit: a wounded former Republican soldier hiding from the Francoist forces (a maquis guerrilla). She helps him until her father—the guardian of the hive—denounces him, and the Civil Guard kills him. Finally, Ana flees the hive. In the solitude of the dense forest, she invokes the spirit. Once again, as it did with the girl by the lake, it plays with her. From the waters, a new Ana is reborn—a new spirit, capable of confronting the misery and wretchedness of Fascist Spain, such an atrocious reality.
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