It has been 31 years since we last saw a feature film by the Spanish maestro Victor Erice, and that film was the transcendent documentary the ephemeral nature of art, The Quince Tree Sun. He remains most well know for his 1973 debut, The Spirit of the Beehive, about a young girl’s transformative encounter with cinema, and he followed it up in 1983 with a melancholy study of an emotionally estranged father and daughter in The South. Close Your Eyes is a scintillating and unspeakably powerful addition to this small but perfectly formed corpus of films, telling of a filmmaker attempting to find the missing actor who strayed from his incomplete final film.
Erice: The idea for was generated by the memory of my film , and from the frustration that came from it being unfinished [due to budgetary restrictions, Erice was only able to make half of the proposed feature]. What this new film talks about only really took shape when I concocted the character of the director. The origin, then, is not an image or an object, but a very personal experience.
