Close your eyes at Afi Silver

For one week only, AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center presents “Close your eyes,” Spanish film director Víctor Erice’s 2023 return to feature filmmaking after a three-decade-long absence.

Close your eyes

• Directed by Victor Erice, Spain, 2023, 169 minutes.
• Original title: Cerrar los ojos.
• In Spanish. Watch trailer.
• Official Selection, 2023 Cannes, Toronto and New York film festivals.

Spanish auteur Víctor Erice returns to feature filmmaking after his absence with this personal, discursive and simmering reflection on memory, art and the passage of time.

Years after his lead actor and best friend, Julio, disappears suddenly from a film shoot, filmmaker Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) is approached by a TV show profiling this unsolved mystery. This sets in motion a series of encounters from Miguel’s past, including a meeting with Julio’s abandoned daughter (played by “The spirit of the beehive’s” child lead Ana Torrent, now a seasoned actor, reuniting with Erice after a half century).

Leisurely but deliberately paced, Close your eyes’s mystery unfolds and builds to a potent crescendo, confronting dichotomies of past and present, text and metatext, celluloid and digital and history and modernity. In its culmination, Erice reveals an act of cinematic awakening that reflects on his own extended absence and revered identity in cinema.

—AFI Silver Theater