The Midnight Sun Film Festival is held every June in the Finnish village of Sodankylä beyond the arctic circle — where the sun never sets. Founded by Aki and Mika Kaurismäki along with Anssi Mänttäri and Peter von Bagh in 1985, the festival has played host to an international who’s who of directors and each day begins with a two-hour discussion. To mark the festival’s silver anniversary, festival director Peter von Bagh edited together highlights from these dialogues to create an epic four-part choral history of cinema drawn from the anecdotes, insights, and wisdom of his all-star cast: Coppola, Fuller, Forman, Chabrol, Corman, Demy, Kieslowski, Kiarostami, Varda, Oliveira, Erice, Rouch, Gilliam, Jancso — and 64 more. Ranging across innumerable topics (war, censorship, movie stars, formative influences, America, neorealism) these voices, many now passed away, engage in a personal dialogue across the years that’s by turns charming, profound, hilarious and moving.

Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice talks about the first movie he probably ever saw, Roy William Neill's The Scarlet Claw (1944), starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. The remembrances of such a formative cinematic experience leads him to recall the dark days after the end of the Spanish Civil War, to confess the many fears stalking children and to reflect on the nature of memory itself.

Relationships and multiple influences between two great directors of modern cinema.

Greek Theo Angelopoulos traveling from Athens to Ostia, the Roman beach where Pasolini was killed. Far from there, in a Spanish train station, Víctor Erice wanders in an interview about the film resistance. And in Italy, Tonino Guerra, Ninetto Davoli and Nico Naldini lend his voice to the missing Passolini to close a historic triangle on film and solitude.

Documentary about director/artist Nicholas Ray and his time as a University professor

Bergala makes Erice wander about (DV in hand) between Madrid and Paris remembering those primeval scenes in his education as a filmmaker, retrieving places more alive than ever in his cinéphile memory. Paris-Madrid, allers-retours fuses genealogy & elegy, diving into the roots of Erice’s oeuvre.

The story of the creation of The Spirit of the Beehive, a film directed by Víctor Erice in 1973.

In Spain, Antoñito, a child, is punished to remain standing doing the fascist salute. As an adult, turned into a young college student, he tries to free himself from the perverse amalgam of ideas, values and beliefs with which his family, the Catholic Church and the repressive elements of the Franco Regime poisoned his mind during his childhood.

A documentary made for Spanish television with an interview of film director Victor Erice concerning his 1983 film "El Sur."

An interview with Spanish film director Victor Erice, conducted by Hideyuki Miyaoka

Six authorities of cinema describe their approach to transcendence, mysticism, spirituality and life after dead.