Víctor Erice's return to commercial cinema will be a nostalgic drama about the friendship between a veteran director and his lead actor

The name of Víctor Erice (Carranza, Bizkaia, 82 years old) continues to maintain a sacrosanct aura on the altars of world cinephiles.

For 30 years, since

(1992), his career has turned his back on commercial cinema, on theatrical releases.

He could have broken with the frustrated adaptation of

in 1999, a novel by Juan Marsé on which he worked for three years and to which he dedicated 10 versions of the script, and which he ultimately did not shoot.

But now there may finally be a fourth feature film by Erice with

a project with a screenplay co-written with Michel Gaztambide

and Goya Award for

and that will star Ginés García Millán and José Coronado.

The new film could be ready for the Cannes festival in 2023.

More information

Víctor Erice finds the stone and the sky in the origins of Oteiza

Although the script is currently being rewritten, in the usual polishing process of any film, those who have read the script assure that there will be no major changes in the plot.

The story begins in April 2012 when a television program in the style of

locates a veteran film director, former writer, who lives in retirement dedicated to fishing.

That director made a film, and the second was left unfinished in 1990 when the protagonist, a friend from the director's military service, and a successful heartthrob in the cinema, disappeared.

Of that second feature film, only the initial and final sequences are finished.

The investigation of the television program causes an emotional earthquake in the filmmaker, his reunion with the people he knew in those years and the memory of his friendship with the actor.

Ginés García Millán will play the director, a creator who does not have much appreciation for his work, and who lives apart from the world and from everyone, due to family misfortune and the abrupt end of his second major shoot.

José Coronado will be the actor, who at the time of his mysterious disappearance, on the edge of a cliff, was 46 years old, had received a Goya award, and feared for the decline of his physique, on which he had cemented the career of him.

Both had been an inseparable couple of adventures, they had even shared girlfriends.

Now, the director, after agreeing to appear on the show to show some of the images from the unfinished film and to earn some money, begins to get back in touch with people from his past, while seeking to clarify what happened to his friend, whom he does not know. more trace was left than a pair of shoes and his abandoned car.

his corpse,

Marsé, the power of cinema and the Borgian castle

In that libretto there are nods to Marsé, to the truncated project of

to

(1983) and to his portrait of melancholic and devastated mature men.

There is also an allusion to the power of cinema as a catalyst for emotions, something that was already conveyed by the gaze of Ana Torrent as a child in

(1973), in one of the most famous images in the history of cinema.

In Erice's new script, the two sequences of the aborted film take place in a French

called Triste le Roy, a tribute to the work of Jorge Luis Borges.

In addition, there are a handful of female characters praised by those who have read the script.

The project was being carried out in secret so as not to alter its good course.

Cristina Zumárraga, from Tandem Films, has declined to participate in this report.

The script was already underway since last fall with the intention of shooting this coming October.

That secrecy was broken last Tuesday, when Canal Sur announced that among its cinema grants destined for 11 fiction feature films and 18 documentaries (which between all of them share 2.4 million euros), it would dedicate an item to the project

“with José Coronado and María León as protagonists”.

Along with Tandem Films, the Malaga production company Pecado Films —recipient of the Andalusian public broadcaster's aid— and Nautilus, Erice's own production company, participate in this film.

Right now the production is still being assembled and the cast of a film is being finalized which, due to the size of its script, could reach two and a half hours of footage.

However, there are still rewrites of history to come, and that could change.

Work outside the commercial halls

Erice has not been hand in hand since

prize of the jury and winner of the Fipresci award, given by international critics, at Cannes in 1992 (25 years later, the French festival screened a restored print).

In 1994, the filmmaker was commissioned to adapt Marsé's novel

from producer Andrés Vicente Gómez.

He devoted three years to writing it, under the title

first with Antonio Drove and then alone.

Marsé himself spoke enthusiastically of the result, although the possible length of the film of three hours led Gómez to ask him to cut 40 minutes.

Erice agreed and in 1998 a production was launched that was blown up in March 1999. Years later, in 2002, Fernando Trueba made the film with a different script.

Erice's was finally published as a book in November 2001.

Ana Torrent's character attends the screening of 'Frankenstein' in 'The Spirit of the Beehive'

Since then, Erice has directed short films, collaborated on several collective films and maintained an audiovisual correspondence with the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami.

In this way,

(2002) —within

,

(2006) or

(2012), included in

an episodic film about the Portuguese city of Guimarães, have given more samples of his immense talent.

He has done much more, such as participating in Alberto Morais's

(2008), alongside Theo Angelopoulos;

film pieces about Antonio López or repeat with Ana Torrent in

(2011), collective work dedicated to the victims of the Fukushima disaster of March 2011;

and other video installations and film essays.

In November 2021, Erice, in his last act with the press, presented

an essay on the sculptor Jorge Oteiza, and there he said: “I have not stopped being a filmmaker, which has been my main dedication.

Everything I've done [after

which have been quite a few things that have circulated through places not typical of the film industry.

The problem is not producing films, but where they are projected, and in recent years I have done work, but unknown”.

The news of the pre-production of

has gone around the cinematographic world, which anxiously awaits a new work by a fundamental filmmaker.