{ "id": "epbv9a7tq1", "slug": "la-colmena", "title": "La Colmena", "updated": "2026-11-01", "topic_path": [ { "id": "culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture" }, { "id": "culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "label": "Drama and biographical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1980s", "label": "Drama films 1980s", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1980s" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1980s.yr-1980-1985", "label": "Released 1980 to 1985", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1980s.yr-1980-1985" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1980s", "label": "Western Europe · 1946 to 2000: Drama films 1980s", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1980s", "path": [ { "id": "geo.weu", "label": "Western Europe", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946", "label": "Western Europe · 1946 to 2000", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "label": "Drama and biographical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1980s", "label": "Drama films 1980s", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1980s" } ] } ], "excerpt": "La Colmena: 1951 postwar Madrid novel by Camilo José Cela, censored in Spain and first published in Buenos Aires, and its 1982 Mario Camus film adaptation that won the Berlin Golden Bear.", "snippet": "La Colmena: 1951 postwar Madrid novel by Camilo José Cela, censored in Spain and first published in Buenos Aires, and its 1982 Mario Camus film adaptation that won the Berlin Golden Bear.", "node": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1980s.yr-1980-1985", "markdown": "# La Colmena\n\n**La Colmena** (\"The Hive\") is a 1951 novel by the Spanish writer [Camilo José Cela](https://www.edgepedia.org/camilo-jose-cela) and a 1982 film adaptation directed by Mario Camus. The novel, Cela's fourth, portrays a panorama of desperate lives in Madrid during the early postwar years, and the film, scripted by producer José Luis Dibildos as a coproduction with Televisión Española, won the [Golden Bear](https://www.edgepedia.org/golden-bear) at the 1982 Berlin Film Festival.[1](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/) • [2](https://www.penguinlibros.com/cl/tematicas/25233-ebook-la-colmena-9788466353076/fragmento)\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Novel | Written 1945–1950; Cela's fourth novel; published in 1951 in Buenos Aires by Emecé Editores because it was censored in Spain[1](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/) • [3](https://www.cidadedacultura.gal/es/node/3963) |\n| First Spanish edition | 1963, nearly twenty years after the manuscript was first sent to the censors[4](https://elpais.com/cultura/2025-11-08/cela-el-censor-censurado-una-primera-version-de-la-colmena-abre-una-ventana-a-un-mundo-literario-cautivo-de-una-dictadura-pacata.html) |\n| Setting | Madrid in the early 1940s postwar years, centered on the café La Delicia; the film is set in 1942 or the winter of 1943 depending on the source[5](https://academia.andaluza.net/la-colmena-la-vida-y-supervivencia-en-la-posguerra-espanola/) • [6](https://www.filmvandaag.nl/film/38156-la-colmena/online-kijken) |\n| Film | Directed by Mario Camus, 1982, 1 h 52 min, drama; screenplay by José Luis Dibildos; coproduction with Televisión Española[7](https://www.sensacine.com/peliculas/pelicula-3149/) • [1](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/) |\n| Award | Golden Bear (Oso de Oro) at the Berlin Film Festival, 1982[2](https://www.penguinlibros.com/cl/tematicas/25233-ebook-la-colmena-9788466353076/fragmento) |\n| Spanish box office | 1,493,214 spectators and €2,054,666.51 in receipts, per the ICAA film catalog[8](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/es-es/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=34581&q=true) |\n| Cast | José Sacristán, Ana Belén, Concha Velasco, Charo López, José Luis López Vázquez, Fiorella Faltoyano, Francisco Rabal, Victoria Abril, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, José Bódalo, among others[8](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/es-es/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=34581&q=true) |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Plot\n\nThe story unfolds across a single Madrid winter, four years after the Civil War, in 44 short sequences built around two places: doña Rosa's café, La Delicia, and doña Jesusa's brothel.[1](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/) The city is cold, food is rationed, and the black market hums in the shadows. The first scene takes place in the café itself, where the camera drifts from table to table the way a bee moves from cell to cell, picking up a conversation mid-sentence and dropping it for the next.\n\nMartín Marco (José Sacristán) is the man the film follows most closely. He is a poet with no money, no publisher, and no plan, who cadges coffee and cigarettes, borrows from relatives, and spends his afternoons in the café reading newspapers he has not bought, thinking of himself as an observer above the transactions around him. Those transactions never stop. Victorita ([Ana Belén](https://www.edgepedia.org/ana-belen)), a young woman of the café's orbit, sells herself out of simple hunger; Julita (Victoria Abril) also moves in the café's orbit. Doña Rosa (María Luisa Ponte) runs La Delicia with a hard eye and a soft silence; Don Pablo (Francisco Rabal), the aging father of the young Rosa, sits among the tables like a piece of the furniture, weary and dignified. A well-off doctor does genuine charity work at a clinic for the poor while lying to his wife; civil servants, Falangists, prostitutes, and their clients all pass through, each with something to hide or something to sell.\n\nNothing resolves. A man is beaten and does not come back to his table. A widow and her daughter scrape through another week. Who owes whom, and who is watching whom, accumulates quietly across the visits to the café, and the differences between visits do the storytelling: who is missing, who has money this week, who has been taken in by the police. One detail people remember: the marbles on the café tables turn out to be tombstones placed upside down, the dead literally under every cup of coffee.[1](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/)\n\n**The ending is the film's boldest move.** After a night of wandering through Madrid, Martín Marco is picked up by the police and beaten, and the film leaves his fate unresolved while the city carries on around him. There is no scene of grief and no reckoning, only the machinery closing quietly over a man who believed that watching was the same as being safe. The hive does not mourn its drones. It is the only ending the structure could have: the one character the film followed most closely, the self-styled observer, learns that observation is no protection, and his death is tragic precisely because it happens to no one in particular.\n\n### Characters\n\n- **Martín Marco** (José Sacristán) is the penniless poet, the film's closest thing to a protagonist. He borrows, freeloads, and observes, convinced that his detachment raises him above the hive; his fate is left unresolved.\n- **Doña Rosa** (María Luisa Ponte) owns La Delicia. She knows everything that happens at her tables and judges none of it, the fixed point around which the film orbits.\n- **Don Pablo** (Francisco Rabal) is the father of the young Rosa, a weary old man whose quiet presence anchors the café scenes.\n- **Victorita** (Ana Belén) is a young woman driven to prostitution by hunger, played with a frightening directness and no self-pity.\n- **The doctor** (Agustín González among the ensemble) is genuinely good at his charity clinic and genuinely a liar and an adulterer, and the film refuses to let either fact cancel the other.\n- Around them, a deep bench of Spanish character actors fills even two-minute scenes: Concha Velasco, Charo López, José Luis López Vázquez, Imanol Arias, and a very young [Antonio Banderas](https://www.edgepedia.org/antonio-banderas) in a small part.\n\n## The novel\n\nCela wrote *La colmena* between 1945 and 1950, aiming at a panoramic, kaleidoscopic view of the depressed Madrid of the early postwar years. The book dispenses with a single protagonist who would organize the narrative linearly, instead presenting a \"hive\" full of characters and desperate situations; the Cervantes exhibition account counts more than 300 characters in a slice of Madrid life from the first years after the Civil War.[1](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/) • [9](https://cvc.cervantes.es/el_rinconete/anteriores/febrero_18/13022018_01.htm) • [3](https://www.cidadedacultura.gal/es/node/3963)\n\n**Censorship.** The novel's path to print was long. Cela conceived it as the first volume of a series he called *Caminos inciertos* (\"Uncertain Paths\"), which he never continued, and during writing the book carried five different titles: *Los clientes de María Domingo*, *Café europeo*, *Café La Delicia*, *La ciudad llagada*, and finally *La colmena*. He submitted it to the Francoist censors on 7 January 1946 and received a first refusal; the civil censor raised few objections, but the Catholic censor judged it \"francamente inmoral y a veces pornográfica y en ocasiones irreverente\" (frankly immoral and at times pornographic and occasionally irreverent). Cela kept revising and pressing, reading passages publicly in Madrid and Barcelona, and the book finally appeared in 1951 in Buenos Aires, published in exile from Spain by Emecé Editores. A Spanish edition followed only in 1963.[3](https://www.cidadedacultura.gal/es/node/3963) • [4](https://elpais.com/cultura/2025-11-08/cela-el-censor-censurado-una-primera-version-de-la-colmena-abre-una-ventana-a-un-mundo-literario-cautivo-de-una-dictadura-pacata.html) • [1](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/)\n\nThe text in current circulation is essentially the version Cela fixed in 1969, collected in volume 5 of his *Obras completas* (1990).[2](https://www.penguinlibros.com/cl/tematicas/25233-ebook-la-colmena-9788466353076/fragmento)\n\n## The 1982 film\n\nThe adaptation was initiated by the producer José Luis Dibildos, who also wrote the screenplay, as a coproduction with Televisión Española intended for exploitation in both media. It was planned from the start as a large production with a distinguished cast, at a budget of about ninety million pesetas largely financed by TVE, which in the early 1980s was committed to adapting major works of Spanish literature.[1](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/) • [9](https://cvc.cervantes.es/el_rinconete/anteriores/febrero_18/13022018_01.htm) A contemporary *El País* report called it the most ambitious project of Spanish cinema.[10](https://elpais.com/diario/1982/10/11/cultura/403138807_850215.html?outputType=amp)\n\nThe film premiered on 11 October 1982 at the Cines Palacio de la Música in Madrid.[11](https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/alece/registro_pelicula/?id=1598) The ICAA catalog records 1,493,214 spectators and receipts of €2,054,666.51.[8](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/es-es/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=34581&q=true) At the Berlin Film Festival the same year it won the Golden Bear.[2](https://www.penguinlibros.com/cl/tematicas/25233-ebook-la-colmena-9788466353076/fragmento)\n\n**Adaptation choices.** The novel's loose, panoramic structure gave the screenwriter room to invent without forcing the material: Dibildos added new settings such as a dance hall where men pay to dance with women, developed scenes Cela had only sketched, such as the discovery that the café's table tops are made from gravestones, and introduced new characters. Among these is an inventor of words played by Cela himself, a figure who does not appear in the novel but does appear in one of his short stories; his presence seemed to lend legitimacy to an adaptation as careful and ambitious as it was costly.[9](https://cvc.cervantes.es/el_rinconete/anteriores/febrero_18/13022018_01.htm) • [1](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/) Where the novel has more than 300 characters, the film follows about 60 people seen inside and outside the café, in the houses and streets of the city, most of them struggling to survive.[3](https://www.cidadedacultura.gal/es/node/3963) • [12](https://www.rtve.es/play/videos/cine-de-siempre/colmena/6690741/)\n\n## Reception and political context\n\nThe film reached Spanish screens in the middle of the electoral campaign that brought the [Spanish Socialist Workers' Party](https://www.edgepedia.org/spanish-socialist-workers-party) (PSOE) to power in 1982. The scholar Carmen Gustrán Loscos argues that the party's slogan \"Por el cambio\" (\"For change\"), centered on modernization rather than reclamation of the pre-war legal order, did not sit easily with a film denouncing the dictatorship, and that the promotion accordingly softened the film's harshness; the poster read that the hard winter of 1943 \"no merece la pena que nos dejemos invadir por la tristeza\" (is not worth letting ourselves be invaded by sadness).[13](https://zaguan.unizar.es/record/30644/files/TESIS-2015-005.pdf)\n\nA production dispute preceded the release: in October 1982 Dibildos told the press that the Ministry of Culture had not recognized the film's right to the state economic protection granted to all Spanish-nationality productions, because the Directorate General of Cinematography had suspended the right pending resolution of whether Agata Films was the sole producer or whether a coproduction with TVE existed and in what proportions.[14](https://elpais.com/diario/1982/10/06/cultura/402706802_850215.html)\n\nCritically, the adaptation has been taken as a counterexample to the claim that literary adaptations necessarily betray their originals. Sally Faulkner, a scholar at the [University of Exeter](https://www.edgepedia.org/university-of-exeter), argues in a 2004 study that the film examines the possibility of recovering the past in a way reminiscent of revisionist accounts of postmodernism, rather than reducing it to nostalgia.[15](https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/shci.1.1.17/0)\n\n## The 1946 manuscript\n\nIn 2025 the Ministry of Culture confirmed the discovery in the Archivo General de la Administración in [Alcalá de Henares](https://www.edgepedia.org/alcala-de-henares) of a complete first version of the novel: the 100-page typescript Cela submitted to the censors on 7 January 1946, bearing censor's crossings-out and annotations, along with notes for a prologue and recommendations from contemporary authors. Álex Alonso, a professor at [Brooklyn College](https://www.edgepedia.org/brooklyn-college) of the [City University of New York](https://www.edgepedia.org/city-university-of-new-york), found it that summer in a box thought to contain the 1953 censors' report on the Argentine edition. The City Council of Alcalá de Henares has asked the Spanish government to keep the document in the city and put it on public display.[4](https://elpais.com/cultura/2025-11-08/cela-el-censor-censurado-una-primera-version-de-la-colmena-abre-una-ventana-a-un-mundo-literario-cautivo-de-una-dictadura-pacata.html) • [16](https://cadenaser.com/cmadrid/2025/10/31/alcala-de-henares-el-ayuntamiento-solicita-que-el-original-inedito-de-la-colmena-de-cela-permanezca-en-la-ciudad-ser-henares/)\n\n## Other uses of the name\n\nThe title has been used elsewhere. *La colmena* is also a 2022 Mexican short documentary by University of Guanajuato students, working under the pseudonyms \"Víctor Jara\" and \"Jean Renoir\", about harassment cases at their university between 2015 and the 2019 conflict between students and authorities; it won first prize for best short film at the Festival Internacional de Cine Guanajuato 2021 and was selected for the Short Film Corner at Cannes 2022.[17](https://www.sensacine.com.mx/peliculas/pelicula-304390/) La Colmena is also a Spanish nonprofit platform that each year selects twelve young artists from portfolio submissions and offers them free mentoring, exhibitions, workshops, and critical publications; it was started by the digital publication La Grieta.[18](https://masdearte.com/especiales/la-colmena-2/) In 2014 the American maker Warped Cigars launched a cigar line called La Colmena, Spanish for \"the beehive\", made at the El Titan de Bronze factory in Miami.[19](https://cigar-coop.com/2014/09/cigar-review-la-colmena-amado-no-44-by.html)\n\n## References\n\n1. [La colmena, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea (Making Of no. 29)](https://www.centrocp.com/la-colmena/)\n2. [Ignacio Echevarría, introduction to La colmena, Biblioteca de Camilo José Cela, Debolsillo](https://www.penguinlibros.com/cl/tematicas/25233-ebook-la-colmena-9788466353076/fragmento)\n3. [La Colmena, la trilogía inacabada, Cidade da Cultura](https://www.cidadedacultura.gal/es/node/3963)\n4. [Cela, el censor censurado, El País (8 November 2025)](https://elpais.com/cultura/2025-11-08/cela-el-censor-censurado-una-primera-version-de-la-colmena-abre-una-ventana-a-un-mundo-literario-cautivo-de-una-dictadura-pacata.html)\n5. [La colmena: la vida y supervivencia en la posguerra española, Academia Andaluza](https://academia.andaluza.net/la-colmena-la-vida-y-supervivencia-en-la-posguerra-espanola/)\n6. [La colmena (1982), FilmVandaag](https://www.filmvandaag.nl/film/38156-la-colmena/online-kijken)\n7. [La colmena, SensaCine](https://www.sensacine.com/peliculas/pelicula-3149/)\n8. [COLMENA, LA, Catálogo de Películas ICAA](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/es-es/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=34581&q=true)\n9. [Rafael Nieto Jiménez, La literatura de posguerra en el cine español (9): La colmena, Rinconete, Instituto Cervantes](https://cvc.cervantes.es/el_rinconete/anteriores/febrero_18/13022018_01.htm)\n10. [La película La colmena se ha convertido en el proyecto más ambicioso del cine español, El País (11 October 1982)](https://elpais.com/diario/1982/10/11/cultura/403138807_850215.html?outputType=amp)\n11. [La colmena, Adaptaciones de la literatura española en el cine español, Cervantes Virtual](https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/alece/registro_pelicula/?id=1598)\n12. [Historia de nuestro cine: La colmena, RTVE](https://www.rtve.es/play/videos/cine-de-siempre/colmena/6690741/)\n13. [Carmen Gustrán Loscos, El franquismo en el cine español (1975–2000), Universidad de Zaragoza thesis](https://zaguan.unizar.es/record/30644/files/TESIS-2015-005.pdf)\n14. [El Ministerio de Cultura no reconoce a La colmena la protección económica, El País (6 October 1982)](https://elpais.com/diario/1982/10/06/cultura/402706802_850215.html)\n15. [Sally Faulkner, The question of authenticity: Camus's film adaptation of Cela's La colmena, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 1(1), 2004](https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/shci.1.1.17/0)\n16. [El Ayuntamiento solicita que el original inédito de La Colmena permanezca en la ciudad, Cadena SER (31 October 2025)](https://cadenaser.com/cmadrid/2025/10/31/alcala-de-henares-el-ayuntamiento-solicita-que-el-original-inedito-de-la-colmena-de-cela-permanezca-en-la-ciudad-ser-henares/)\n17. [La Colmena (cortometraje), SensaCine México](https://www.sensacine.com.mx/peliculas/pelicula-304390/)\n18. [La Colmena, plataforma de apoyo a jóvenes artistas, Más de Arte](https://masdearte.com/especiales/la-colmena-2/)\n19. [Cigar Review: La Colmena Amado No. 44 by Warped Cigars, Cigar Coop](https://cigar-coop.com/2014/09/cigar-review-la-colmena-amado-no-44-by.html)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1980s › Released 1980 to 1985*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/la-colmena", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/la-colmena.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"La Colmena\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/la-colmena. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[La Colmena](https://www.edgepedia.org/la-colmena)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/la-colmena](https://www.edgepedia.org/la-colmena). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"La Colmena\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/la-colmena. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "La Colmena: 1951 postwar Madrid novel by Camilo José Cela, censored in Spain and first published in Buenos Aires, and its 1982 Mario Camus film adaptation that won the Berlin Golden Bear." }