Julio Arenas, a renowned Spanish actor, disappears during the filming of a movie. Although his body is never found, the police conclude that he drowned in the sea. Years later, the mystery surrounding his disappearance resurfaces through a television program showcasing his life and death, including exclusive footage of his final scenes captured by his friend, director Miguel Garay. After a thirty-year hiatus, acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice utilizes the film-within-a-film structure to deliver his comeback three-hour piece on memory, identity, aging, and the cinematic medium itself, its power to possess our dreams and evoke our knowledge and fears. The film stimulates memory and in the form of haunting images, brings back what has disappeared and long passed, yet simultaneously faces the danger of disappearing before the onslaught of digital technologies – for the more we record, the less we remember – and an age obsessed with archiving and storing all passing moments on the devices available to us paradoxically produces a culture of forgetfulness. Before us is a hauntingly tender composition steeped in melancholy and enigmatic rumination on establishing a balance between memory and forgetting as we approach the end of life. And yet, Close Your Eyes could also be an ironic commentary or a somber autofictional jest about “solving” the mystery of Erice’s own disappearance. The case is seemingly closed, although nothing is, of course, explained. Let’s hope Erice won’t make us wait for another thirty years for his next film.
Awards and festivals:
Cannes Film Festival (2023) – world premiere; Premios Carmen (2023) – Best Film; Cahiers du cinéma – top 10 films 2023 (2nd place); Días de Cine Awards (2023) – El resplandor Award; ASECAN (2023) – ASGE Award; Portuguese Film Academy Sophia Awards (2023) – Best European Film; Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival (2023) – Best Film; Fotogramas de Plata (2023) – Best Actress (Ana Torrent), Best Spanish Film; International Cinephile Society Awards (2023) – Best Film, Best Director; Goya Awards (2024) – Best Supporting Actor (Jose Coronado)
Víctor Erice studied political science and later film direction at the Escuela Oficial de Cinema, where he graduated in 1963. His debut, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), was awarded the Golden Shell at San Sebastián and is considered a masterpiece of Spanish cinema. After a ten-year-long hiatus, he directed The South (1983), which won the Golden Hugo in Chicago. He confirmed his status as a significant filmmaker and drew comparisons to directors such as Dreyer, Bresson, Tarkovsky, or Kiarostami with his third feature-length project, the drama-documentary Dream of Light (also known as The Quince Tree Sun, 1992), which was awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes and the Golden Hugo in Chicago. He went on to direct the segment Lifeline in the omnibus Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (2002), the short films Red Death and Sea Post made for the installation Erice – Kiarostami: Correspondences (2006), exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and La Casa Escondida in Madrid in 2006, and at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2008, followed by segments in the omnibuses 3.11 (2011) and Historic Center (2012).
