The Spirit of the Beehive

The film revolves around the magical, mysterious, and yet kind world of six-year-old Spanish girl Ana during the era of Franco's dictatorship and its collision with the much less friendly and understandable world of warring adults.

In "Spirit of the Beehive," the difference between two "aliens" is elegantly played out—something non-human on one side and a part of the hostile world of strangers on the other. Little Ana watches Frankenstein in the cinema and decides that the frightening yet alluring spirit lives in an old barn in the middle of a field. When she goes there, she indeed discovers someone she calls "her ghost" and secretly begins to feed.

"The title doesn't actually belong to me. It's borrowed from a book that, in my opinion, is the most beautiful ever written about the life of bees. The author of this book is the great poet and playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck. In this book, Maeterlinck uses the term 'Spirit of the Beehive' to describe this all-powerful, mysterious, and paradoxical spirit that seems to command the bees and is beyond human understanding." Victor Erice