Born in Karrantza Harana (Bizkaia), Víctor Erice spent his childhood and early adolescence in San Sebastian.

In 1961, in Madrid, he enrolled in the Official Film School, graduating with a diploma in Directing in 1963.  

He made his directorial debut shooting an episode of Los desafíos, which carried off the Silver Shell in 1969 at the San Sebastian Festival.

In 1973 he directed, and wrote with Angel Fernández Santos, El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive, Golden Shell for Best Film at the San Sebastian Festival.

His second film, El Sur / The South, screened in the Official Selection at the Festival de Cannes in 1983, receiving the Golden Hugo at Chicago Film Festival that same year.

In 1990, with the artist Antonio López, he made El sol del membrillo / Dream of Light, Jury and International Film Critics’ Prize at Cannes in 1992, voted best film of the decade by film archives and cultural centres worldwide.

In 2002 he shot Alumbramiento, an episode of the feature film Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet.

In 2005, with the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami he featured in the Erice-Kiarostami: Correspondencias Exhibition showing in Barcelona (CCCB), Madrid (Casa Encendida), Paris (Centre Pompidou) and Melbourne (ACMI). The exhibition included audiovisual correspondence between the two directors, as well as the medium-length La morte rouge, in which Erice looked back at his first experience as a cinema spectator in San Sebastian’s Gran Kursaal Theatre-Cinema.

In the following years he worked on video installations: Fragor del mundo, silencio de la pintura (Centre Pompidou), about the painter Antonio López, and Piedra y Cielo (Bilbao Fine Arts Museum), on the funerary stele by sculptor Jorge Oteiza, dedicated to the musician Aita Donostia on mount Agiña (Lesaka).

In 2012, with the filmmakers Manoel de Oliveira, Pedro Costa and Aki Kaurismäki, as part of the feature film Centro histórico, he made Vidros partidos in Portugal.

Víctor Erice has harvested myriad public acknowledgements. Among them, the National Cinematography Prize in 1993; the Golden Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts in 1995; Honorary Leopard for outstanding achievement in cinema received at Locarno Festival in 2014.

Erice has taught extensively in the shape of courses, seminars and workshops. Ever since he joined the Editorial Board of the magazine Nuestro Cine until today, his articles in newspapers, magazines and books have been frequent; he has also given talks and lectures in widely varying locations.

Cerrar los ojos, his fourth feature, can be seen at a special screening in the Victoria Eugenia Theatre, the same place where Erice showed El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive fifty years ago.

Filmmakers José Luis Egea, Víctor Erice and Claudio Guerín at the María Cristina Hotel (‘Los desafíos’, 1969). Photograph: Artxiboa (San Sebastian Festival Archive)