The Spirit of the Beehive

Gilda Bessé shares her Paris apartment with an Irish schoolteacher, Guy Malyon, and Mia, a refugee from Spain. As the world drifts toward war, Gilda defiantly pursues her hedonistic lifestyle and her burgeoning career as a photographer. But Guy and Mia feel impelled to join the fight against fascism, and the three friends are separated.

Spain, 1938, during the Spanish Civil War. Carol, a 12-year-old Spanish-American girl, arrives in her mother's hometown and transforms the secretive family environment. Her innocence and rebellious nature drive her at first to reject a world that is at once foreign and completely new.

When Dr Frankenstein decides to retire from the monster-making business, he calls an international roster of monsters to a creepy convention to elect his successor. Everyone is there including Dracula, The Werewolf, The Creature, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and many more. But Frankenstein's title is not all that is at stake. The famous doctor has also discovered the secret of total destruction that must not fall into the wrong hands!

The sailor Quico Carola, alleged war hero of the Francoist side, emigrated to America and amassed a great fortune. Fifteen years later he returns to Ferrera (Asturias), his homeland, in search of a wife who makes him forget his late girlfriend. There he will see his old friends and Armandina, the widow of a Republican shot during the Spanish civil war.

Following the wedding of his daughter, stone-faced beekeeper Spyros makes an annual journey from the north of Greece to the south, traveling along with his hives. En route, he meets an erratic, young female drifter, with whom he strikes up an unusual, self-destructive relationship.

Javier Navarro, a Falangist, is ordered to infiltrate Republican Madrid to deliver a message to a member of the Fifth Column.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War, the members of a group of vaudeville performers have been stripped of everything: all they have left is hunger and the instinct to survive. Day after day, agonizingly, lost and helpless between the victors and the vanquished, the musician Jorge, the ventriloquist Enrique, the couplet singer Rocío and the orphan Miguel search tirelessly for something to eat and a safe place to live.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the nun Maria is forced to flee her convent. She takes refuge in a brothel, until it is liberated by a woman's anarchist group. Maria joins the group and eventually goes to the front. The women's group faces the problems of fighting not only the nationalists, but also factions on the left seeking to impose a more traditional military structure.

Colometa is an average housewife with two children to care for in the late 1930's, as the Spanish Civil War is starting and her husband goes off to fight. She had been an ordinary woman working in a shop when she met the lively carpenter who married her, and their life together was without major problems. But now she is forced to raise her children under straitened circumstances, and after her husband dies, her life undergoes another major change as she marries for the second time. Underneath Colometa's acquiescent, forebearing exterior must lie just a few discontents, a few unrealized dreams - but they never surface as she blithely moves from one episode in her life to another.

In the harsh post-war years' Catalan countryside, Andreu, a child that belongs to the losing side, finds the corpses of a man and his son in the forest. The authorities want his father to be made responsible of the deaths, but Andreu tries to help his father by finding out who truly killed them. In this search, Andreu develops a moral consciousness against a world of adults fed by lies. In order to survive, he betrays his own roots and ends up finding out the monster that lives within him.

Professor Lola Sánchez investigates the truth behind the events experienced by Rafael Sánchez Mazas, one of the founders of the Falange Española party, during the Spanish Civil War.

David Carr is a British Communist who is unemployed. In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War begins, he decides to fight for the Republican side, a coalition of liberals, communists and anarchists, so he joins the POUM militia and witnesses firsthand the betrayal of the Spanish revolution by Stalin's followers and Moscow's orders.