Directed by Carlos Saura • 1977 • Spain
Starring Fernando Rey, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabel Mestres

In ELISA, VIDA MÍA (“Elisa, My Dear”), Carlos Saura explores one of his recurring obsessions—interplay between past and present, memory and reality—through a spellbinding portrait of a complex father-daughter relationship. Saura’s longtime companion and collaborator Geraldine Chaplin stars in an intriguing double role, playing both a woman who reunites with her estranged, now ailing father (Fernando Rey, winner of the Cannes Best Actor award) and her own mother. As the old man works away on an autobiographical novel, father and daughter each embark on a cathartic reckoning with the past.