Contemporary Spanish Film from Fiction

Víctor Erice rose to international prominence when he directed El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) in 1973. Ten years later he directed El sur (The South), which was adapted from a novella written by his wife, Adelaida García Morales. The latter film concerns “a young girl’s passage from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adulthood” in the context of social divisions which characterise post‐civil war Spain.

Thomas Deveny’s book is a study of Spanish films produced since the mid‐1960s, which were based on fiction written after the civil war. The analyses appear...