The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

A 1973 film about a child in 1940 watching a movie made in 1931.

THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE was made under Franco's dictatorship, which meant that anything it wanted to say about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath had to be said obliquely - through silence, through atmosphere, through the way light falls on a child's face. Open statement wasn't available. So director Víctor Erice found another way in.

The mechanism is James Whale's Frankenstein. When young Ana watches it in a traveling cinema, something shifts. The monster doesn't frighten her so much as open a door - to imagination, to a relationship with fear that the adults around her have stopped allowing themselves.

The house the family lives in has honey-colored light and windows like a beehive. It's one of the most beautiful spaces in cinema. It's also, in a way, a trap - a world sealed off from history, from the war that just ended, from everything the country is not allowed to say out loud.

Ana Torrent, who plays Ana, was six years old. Her performance is one of the most extraordinary things ever captured on film, almost entirely through watching and listening rather than acting in any conventional sense.

It is regularly named one of the greatest Spanish films ever made. It earns that without raising its voice once.