In Carlos Saura’s enchanting coming-of-age classic, the memory of childhood takes on something mysterious, sensual and gently unsettling. Ana Torrent is unforgettable as Ana, a girl wandering through a house filled with grief, secrets and the shadow of her deceased mother. Set against the final years of Franco’s dictatorship, Cría Cuervos shows how political and familial trauma take root in a child’s imagination, where catchy pop songs, morbid fantasies and everyday rituals suddenly acquire a secret power. As intimate as it is historically charged, the film became a key work of Spanish cinema, in which a country tentatively begins to say goodbye to its ghosts.

This is a release by our distribution label Odyssey Classics.