Close Your Eyes
Aging filmmaker Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) is called upon to recount his memories of working on his final and still unfinished film, “The Farewell Gaze.” During its production, the lead actor and Miguel’s close friend, Julio Arenas (José Coronado), vanished without a trace, leaving behind a mystery that would haunt the lives of everyone associated with the film. Miguel never directed another project and instead decided to live a quiet life as a writer by the coast. He remained reluctant to unravel the mystery until approached by an investigative journalist decades later. With careful reflection, he reconnects with the film’s crew, former lovers, and Julio’s daughter, seeking closure and understanding for what the disappearance meant to all their lives.
Over three decades after the release of his previous film, revered Spanish auteur Víctor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, and Dream of Light) returns with a “poignant cinematic swan song” (The Hollywood Reporter). A reflective culmination of Erice’s career in film, Close Your Eyes is a haunting meditation on memory, absence, and the enduring resonance of the moving image.
Cast
- Manolo Solo
- Jose Coronado
- Ana Torrent
- María León
- Helena Miquel
- "A stunning return. A quietly astonishing new movie...has its own warm spirit of optimism but, happily, none of the self-regarding solipsism you might fear from such a personal valentine to cinema."
- "Erice’s fourth feature is a stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, and it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal."
- "A poignant cinematic swan song."
- "A shimmery, nourishing culmination of ideas and ellipses in a career so elusive as to have taken on a mythic quality, to the point that his latest feels almost dreamed into being."
- "A slow-burn marvel which climaxes in a sequence of overwhelming profundity and mystery."
- "A moving meditation on existence, memory, and cinema’s potential to preserve them both."
- "Winningly satisfying and cerebral...."
- "A bittersweet homage to how movies can bring us together and remind us of the past but never bring us back to the people we once were. "
- "Nearly 50 years after his stunning debut 'The Spirit of the Beehive,' Victor Erice returns with an equally moving ode to the power of memories — and the movies...For those of us who love the movies as a medium for connection, the climax is something close to bliss. Any sense of bitterness over the hands of fate is gone. What you’re left with is the idea that you can still find peace, so long as you’re willing to look for it."
- "It’s hard to envisage a more emotionally overwhelming farewell, if that’s what Close Your Eyes becomes, from a vital, too-often missing, force in world cinema."
- "A passionate, big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, 'Close Your Eyes' engagingly reflects on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past."
- "Close Your Eyes is a deeply personal capstone by the 84-year-old artist."
- "Quietly transcendent, Close Your Eyes may be among the best films you see all year...You don’t have to know Erice’s work to get swept up in Close Your Eyes. But those who do know his work will find the new film an almost unbearably moving experience."
- "[A] breathtakingly melancholic film infused with mourning, journeying its way through subtly painful yet often poetic conversations about searching for something lost that may never be found. That only makes all the discoveries it makes that much more stunning to behold."
- "[A]n elegiac, career-capping epic...Watching Close Your Eyes, we marvel at Mr. Erice’s sweeping artistry, having found it alive and well."
- "It's concurrently a love letter and a eulogy to the form, which Erice professes as having a life after death, though ever more tenuously so due to the existential carelessness that’s come with digital cinema versus celluloid. All of this exists within the cracks of the furrowed narrative. Watch more closely—it beguiles, and we see cinema in all its living form so that we too may remember what it is."
- "4/4 STARS. The movie’s senses of cinema are never present for self-consciously clever, self-referential reasons. Rather, they’re deeply intertwined with considerations of age and mortality. The searching of a now-84-year-old maestro of cinema is exquisitely moving and speaks with an urgency that isn’t at all undermined by the films languid pace."
- "[A] 21st century masterpiece about remembering and forgetting the 20th century."
- "[Erice] allows us to keep our faith in the beauty, mystery, and magic of films as a constant act of remembrance in the face of oblivion. It offers up a very particular immortality in the face of death, such that, in a Janus-like manner, we can turn our gaze toward both the past and the future of cinema."
Awards & Recognition
Cannes Film Festival
Toronto Int'l. Film Festival
New York Film Festival
BFI London Film Festival
San Sebastián Int'l. Film Festival
Best Non-U.S. Release
Online Film Critics Society Awards
Best Picture
International Cinephile Society Awards
Best Director
International Cinephile Society Awards
Best Director
Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain
Best Original Screenplay
Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain
Best Supporting Actor
Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain
Best Supporting Actress
Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain
Best Supporting Actor
Goya Awards
10 Categories
Goya Awards
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