The Spirit of the Beehive

Itinerant projection-equipment repairman Bruno Winter and depressed hitchhiker Robert Lander - a doctor who has just been through a break-up with his wife and a half-hearted suicide attempt - travel along the Western side of the East-German border in a repair truck, visiting worn-out movie theaters, learning to communicate across their differences.

A woman recalls her childhood growing up in the North of Spain, focusing on her relationship with her father.

In an unnamed Latin American country that closely resembles Mexico, the government fights a rural insurgency with torture, assault, rape, and murder. Soldiers descend on a town, cutting off the rebels from their cache of ammunition hidden in a field. A family of grandfather, son, and grandson are among the rebels in the hills. The grandfather, with his violin over his shoulder, tries to pass the checkpoint, ostensibly to tend his corn crop. The commanding officer lets him pass but insists on a daily music lesson.

Filmmaker Victor Erice follows Spanish artist Antonio Lopez in his painstaking attempt to paint the image of a tree.

There are two of them: a mother and a girl. They have no names. And they are in a constant run. The mother runs away from the daughter in an attempt to start new life, and the girl runs after her mother as she has no idea how to live without her. This endless run is full with repeated mistakes and resembles a barrel-organ sorrowful song or a spinning-top rotation. This small ridiculous toy "volchok" was the first toy in the girl's life, the only thing that tied her with the mother.

An atomic explosion awakens Gammera, a giant fire breathing turtle monster from his millions of years of hibernation.

Maria, whose parents live in the country, cannot stand her father's authoritarian ways and moves to the city. She finds a job as a cleaner and tries to survive in a wretched apartment in the shabby part of a big city. She is pregnant, and the fact that her boyfriend has abandoned her does not help matters. When her father goes to the hospital for an operation, her mother comes to stay with her. Her neighbor, an old recluse whose only friend is his dog, begins to come out of his shell and these three lost souls try to give each other the strength to start over.

Mother, father and daughter go to the park. The women doze off on a bench while the father plays a hide-and-seek game with a girl, blindfolded. Charlie leads him into a lake. Both dozing ladies on the bench fall for Charlie and invite him for dinner. The father returns home with a friend. Charlie rushes upstairs and dresses like a woman, shaving his mustache. Both men fall for Charlie.

A few days after a massacre in a shantytown near Beirut, the director finds the children who survived. She approaches them by offering them crayons to draw. A link is created between them. They let her film their violent games: they repeat the scenes of horror they saw unfold before their eyes ...

The story of the creation of The Spirit of the Beehive, a film directed by Víctor Erice in 1973.

Over more than a decade, the daughter of a Kyoto Imperial University professor comes of age as she witnesses her father fired for opposing the rise of fascism in Japan and becomes involved with two of his students.

After their father dies, a family of five children are forced to survive on their own in a Kurdish village on the border of Iran and Iraq.