The South

Based on the short story of the same name by Adelaida García Morales and adapted by his ex-partner Víctor Erice, Erice is a Spanish director with a long career but lengthy hiatus between films, who has directed unforgettable titles such as El sol del membrillo (winner of the Grand Prix du Jury) or El espíritu de la colmena. In La Gaviota, in a house topped with a weather-vane, outside a small town in the north, lives Agustín, a doctor and water diviner; Julia, his wife, a teacher and victim of reprisal after the Civil War; and Estrella, their daughter. The film sees Estrella growing up as well as her deepening interest in Agustín. One day, by chance, Estrella finds something that makes her suspicious of her dad having had a relationship with a mysterious woman early on his life. Since then the life in La Gaviota changes, but Estrella does not manage –even in her last conversation with her dad as a teenaged girl- to find out the identity of the woman, who Agustín assumes, stayed in the south.