Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival, Carla Simón’s second feature is, like her first, set in the Spanish countryside, this time in the agricultural region of Catalonia, which is undergoing huge changes due to real estate investments. The property in question is a peach orchard run by three generations of a family that doesn’t actually own the land they work. It was granted to them by the landowner following the Spanish Civil War, when the farmers hid the landowner and his family from the Republican army, and the landowner told the farmers they could use the land in perpetuity, but no deed was signed. It was essentially a gentlemen’s agreement, and the current heir to the landowner has given in to financial pressure from an interested corporation and sold the land for a solar farm. The farmers have until the end of the summer to harvest what will be their last crop. 

This crisis only serves to exacerbate the kind of intra-family frictions that are common when so many members depend on one source of income for their livelihoods. At the center is Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet), the short-fused, de facto head of the household now that his father, Rogelio (Josep Abad), the son of the man who made the handshake deal for the land, is old and effectively retired. Quimet’s three children vary greatly in age, from teenage Roger, a burgeoning marijuana cultivator, to preschooler Iris (Ainet Jounou), who loves nothing better than to playact war games and sci-fi scenarios with her young twin cousins in the fields and forests surrounding their house. Simón presents their life as an idyll that’s being destroyed by modern technology whose large-scale benefits are good for people in general but whose short-term effects upend and supplant traditions that have sustained this region for centuries. Though the director is careful to provide background as to how other farmers are being driven off their land by speculators and produce wholesalers who purposely keep prices low, she’s mostly interested in how these dynamics affect families at the micro level. So Quimet quickly finds himself at odds with his brother-in-law Cisco (Carles Cabós), who decides to take the landowner’s offer of employment with the company that will manage the solar farm. Since Cisco is clandestinely working with Roger on his pot plants, his enmity with Quimet infects the son, and all these various conflicts incite the stereotypical male Mediterranean hormones, thus alienating the females in the family, in particular the middle daughter, Mariona (Xènia Roset), whose resentment of macho attitudes intensifies accordingly. As the summer stretches on and the family struggles to meet their goals before the trees are removed, the bonds that have kept the family together slacken, but the unit doesn’t disintegrate. Whatever else Simón’s dramatic mission is, she seems intent on the idea that while a farming family is nothing without the soil, they remain family even when the land is taken from them.

At slightly over two hours, Alcarràs‘s tension occasionally slackens as well, but in a way that’s how real life works—even as one’s external situation becomes increasingly desperate, the instinct to live in the moment persists, so the violent outbursts and episodes of heartbreak seem almost random, as they merely puncuate broader scenes of everyday existence. If it all works as well as it does it’s because the actors work as well as they do. Though all are local people who have never acted before and are not related to one another, they come across as a real family fully invested in one another’s well-being. I suppose they all know what to do because they come from similar families. There are some things you just can’t “perform.”

In Catalan and Spanish. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Alcarràs home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Avalon PC/Elastica Films/Vilaut Films/Kino Produzioni/Alcarras Film AI