On the stage at the Vitoria Eugenia theatre where fifty years ago he received the Golden Shell for his first film El Espíritu de la colmena, Victor Erice picked up the Donostia Award last night. The actress Ana Torrent, who as a child starred in the very same film, had the honour of presenting the director with the statuette, and said that it was enormously moving to give Erice the award “50 years after coming together in the same place to present El espíritu de la colmena. Because Víctor has interlaced life and the cinema in such a way that there is something almost magical in the way he has closed the circle.”

Erice himself then came onto the stage to a standing ovation from the audience and in a declaration of love to his hometown recalled how he had grown up in San Sebastian in all senses, as a filmgoer as well, as this was the place where he saw his first film as a child and also where he attended a screening of Fellini’s The nights of Cabiria which was the first film he enjoyed at the Festival back in 1957.

He praised cinema as a window onto the world and said that he had always understood cinema as a form of knowledge. “That’s why for me it never ends.”