badelf
In Victor Erice's luminous "El Sur," the deeply personal becomes profoundly political. This exquisite memory film operates on multiple interlinked planes -- a daughter's coming-of-age, a family fractured by ideology, and a nation emerging from the shadow of authoritarianism.
The film's narrative elegance lies in how Estrella's gradual understanding of her father Agustin mirrors Spain's own painful self-examination after Franco. Just as Estrella discovers her father's complex past -- his estrangement from his own father over political differences, his abandoned love in the South -- Spain itself was confronting its buried histories and unresolved divisions in the early 1980s. The Republicans versus Fascists split that drove Agustin from hi...