El Sur

Estrella grows up in a house in the north. Her father Agustin is a doctor, a man of few words believed to find water with a pendulum. To his daughter he is a magician. Over the years small signs accumulate: a letter, a name, a cinema poster. There is a life he left behind in the south, and there is a woman there. As Estrella grows, her father shrinks. The film never shows the south, and the reason is the production itself. Erice stopped on the forty-eighth day of an eighty-one day schedule when the producer Elias Querejeta suspended the project for financial reasons. Roughly a third of the screenplay, the second half in which Estrella goes south and learns her father's story, was never shot. Erice was told he could film the rest if he cut what existed; it did not happen. He still calls the film an unfinished drama, while Querejeta defended the result and critics backed him. Victor Erice directed, from Adelaida Garcia Morales's novel of the same name. The film as it stands works not despite the gap but partly because of it: never being seen, the south stops being a place and becomes an absence. Who it is for: anyone who likes slow Spanish cinema built on light. Who it is not for: anyone wanting closure. The story ends halfway, the questions go unanswered, and the pace is very heavy.