The Criterion Collection is proud to present Victor Erice's THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (El espiritu de la colmena), widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian village in 1940, directly following the country's devastating civil war, six-year-old Ana attends a traveling movie show of FRANKENSTEIN and becomes haunted by her memory of it. Produced by one of cinema's most mysterious auteur's as Franco's long regime was nearing it's end, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is both a bewitching portrait of a child's inner life and an elusive, cloaked meditation on a nation trapped under tyranny.