Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López explore the joy and regret of nostalgia with one of the cinema’s great, spare poets of sense-memory.

Haunted Memory: The Cinema of Víctor Erice

"I guess you could say that this is a film about my birth. My mother told me once that my father became another person the moment I was born. I believe her because, if I try to remember a time when I might have felt any connection with my father, I can’t: it’s as if there was never any. When I look at my brother playing with his two year old kid, I feel that there was never any. When I listen to my mother talking about how depressed and isolated she was after my birth, I know there was never any. I’ve heard details about that period before, but I’ve never had a full-on narration by her to which I could re-listen. Women’s stories always look like nothing, like a bunch of crazy fantasies or silly talk—but those fantasies are all threaded with the ideas about womanhood by which mothers live and suffer and into which baby girls are born."  https://laughmotel.wordpress.com/2021/08/05/birth/