Carla Simón's Alcarràs is now showing exclusively on MUBI starting February 24, 2023, in many countries—including the United Kingdom, United States, India, Turkey, Ireland, and Brazil—in the series The New Auteurs.
Alcarràs (2022).
Although it unfolds in the languorous heat of high summer, life is not all peaches and cream for the farming family at the center of Alcarràs, Carla Simón’s lyrical second feature. The Solé family have been harvesting peaches in the titular village for decades, and, as the film so acutely portrays, working the land is no mean feat. Soft-fruit farming is a risky business: the fleshy crop spoils quickly and must be harvested fast. This sense of working on borrowed time is compounded by the situation the Solé clan suddenly find themselves in. With the old landowner dead, the new landlord plans to replace the ancient fruit trees with far more profitable solar panels. Served with an eviction notice, the family must leave the land they so love and depend on by the summer’s end. A time-ticking scenario ripe for staging deep-riven tensions, Alcarràs explores the clash between tradition and progress, family farming and the faceless corporations behind renewable energy, all of which unfolds amid the bucolic landscapes of western Catalonia.
If the peach metaphor can be extended still further, it might be said to evoke qualities that well describe Simón’s film: beautiful and bruised, yielding yet bittersweet. The winner of last year’s Golden Bear at the Berlinale, Alcarràs deftly balances both the universal (a family’s fight for survival against the incoming forces of modernization) and the specific: the world of small-scale farming. With its seasonal cycles of harvesting, preserving, and bottling, its annual fiestas and agricultural protests, this universe is brought to life in humming and hypnotic detail. Catalonia’s Lérida is one of the major peach-growing regions in Spain, a country already at the forefront of global peach production. But globalization threatens to destabilize its old ways. Like a modern-day western, the family’s steely gaze hovers on the horizon, for incoming cranes and shimmering solar paneling. The “enemy” here is not a man on horseback but the forward-march of progress, which if not managed correctly, might shatter the fragile ecosystem of family and farm. As in nature, the rural network is mycelial, extending beyond the web of family to include contractors, market sellers, and seasonal workers, most of them African migrants who now face yet more precarious employment. Though the film is focused on the Solés, the ripple effect that this has on other communities comes into sharp relief. If the dead rabbits that litter the land are anything to go by, an ominous future awaits family-based businesses like this one.
Each of the Solés faces the threat in their own way. As the pressures of the harvest take over, overworked and overwrought father Quimet (played by retired farmer Jordi Pujol Dolcet) cannot bear to face the reality of his situation. Whereas the regal patriarch Rogelio (Josep Abad) seems to collapse in on himself, weighed down by the responsibility of his handshake agreement back in the days of the Spanish Civil War. Then there is the next generation. The teenagers and young adults are caught in the push and pull of modernity, from selling weed and the hedonism of rave culture to becoming famous on TikTok, yet they clearly love the land they have grown up in and refuse to abandon it. For the younger children, the rural landscape is their playground: wild, unkempt, and full of nooks, it represents everything they’ve known.
Alcarràs (2022).
Reflecting on the film’s universal themes, Simón has said in interviews that “everybody has a village,” but the phenomenon of the pueblo is quite distinctive in Spain, as indeed in many other European countries. Spain was principally rural until the 1960s, when people started migrating in large swathes to the city centers, leaving behind an “España vaciada,” an emptied Spain. Rural depopulation has long been a concern for the country’s economy, culture, and agriculture. In Alcarràs, the children’s aunt Gloria (played by Berta Pipó, the director’s sister and the only trained actor in the ensemble) is an example of this metropolitan drift, having left the countryside for a more liberal life in Barcelona. Going back to your pueblo in the holidays to visit elderly relatives is common enough for many Spaniards, although this is gradually disappearing as subsequent generations grow up in cities. Regional fiestas are a way of keeping ancient traditions and folklore alive, as well as celebrating the strong sense of community so typical of village life.
A joyful carnivalesque centerpiece in Alcarràs unfolds through the competitive drinking of the porró, a traditional Catalan wine pitcher that allows you to funnel wine from an impressive height, and get very drunk in the process. (In Simón’s debut feature Summer 1993 [2017], the carnivalesque appears in the surrealist Gegants i cabuts procession, with its enormous, Alice in Wonderland-scale papier-mâché masks.) Alcarràs captures the pleasures of food, eaten messily around a table with family. The Solé family’s last supper, imbued with biblical undertones, is a smorgasbord of mouthwatering local dishes, from steaming plates of smoked snails and sausages, to the sticky-sweet peach juice that runs down children’s chins. Simón celebrates the food, farming, and folklore of rural Spain with the eye and ear of a documentarian. Working with nonprofessional actors, many of whom come from farming backgrounds, contributes to the film’s remarkable naturalism.
Spain has a long tradition of rural cinema, like the work of directors Florián Rey, José Antonio Nieves Conde, Josep María Forn, and Icíar Bollaín. Barcelona-born Simón, who grew up in the countryside after losing her parents at a young age, is part of a new wave of Spanish directors exploring rural life in recession-era Spain, without nostalgia but rather with an open-minded ambivalence about its prospects. Whether directly or otherwise, several of these directors reflect on what scholar of Spanish film Matthew J. Marr has called the “small-scale, if historically extraordinary”1 phenomenon of migration from the city to the country. Summer 1993 shows a young, bohemian family getting back to the land, to grow cabbages and oranges and bring their children up in the wildness of the Catalan countryside. Other recent examples include Jonathan Cenzual Burley’s The Shepherd (2016), a rural Salamancan western about a shepherd’s fight to protect his pasture fields from the encroaching threat of outsiders; The Beasts (2022), Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s taut thriller about a French couple who decamp to a Galician village with terrifying results; and perhaps most pertinent for comparison with Alcarràs, Mikel Gurrea’s Catalan farming drama, Suro (2022). In Suro, a young, idealistic couple from Barcelona move to the countryside and start harvesting cork-tree bark. Like Alcarràs, the seasonality of the harvest introduces anxiety, as the workers, all played by nonprofessional actors, have to fight against the clock to yield their crops. Suro similarly deals with the harsh machismo of rural life, although it’s more concerned with the power dynamics that emerge between the middle-class urban landowner, a politically correct idealist who secretly harbors tyrannical tendencies, and the exploited seasonal workers, many of them migrants from North Africa. In Alcarràs, as in Suro and The Beasts, the threat from outside is a morally ambiguous one. Whether an influx of gentrifying urbanites or environmentally friendly renewable energy, if improperly handled, both may topple the delicate infrastructure of the countryside and its vibrant, fast disappearing way of life.
I spoke with Carla Simón over Zoom about improvisation, the seasons, and a rural sensibility in contemporary Spanish cinema.
Alcarràs (2022).
NOTEBOOK: What kind of a place is the town of Alcarràs? And what is your connection to this landscape?
CARLA SIMÓN: Alcarràs is my mum’s village, although I didn’t grow up there. I grew up in another part of Catalonia but went to Alcarràs on summer and Easter holidays. It’s not a typical holiday destination, but a very agricultural place. What interested me about the area is that it’s not the wild nature where I grew up with, but a nature built by man. The landscape is very flat. I call it the Catalan Far West, because of the flatness and the little mountains. But also because of the people. They remind me of characters in westerns in their masculine roles.
I always felt a great desire to portray this landscape. It’s a very striking place, because of the light and the skies, but also because it’s tough to live there. It’s very cold in winter, with a lot of mist, and in summer it’s very hot. The villagers are very practical and the village has its own specific ecosystem. They are not used to having film crews there and collaborated a lot with us. The Civil War is still very present there. It’s on the border between Catalonia and Aragon, where there were lots of battles. So this idea that the Civil War is still there in the landscape, and in the memory of the people, was important.
NOTEBOOK: Clearly a source of local pride, the film’s success has been widely documented, particularly in the Spanish press, which has covered its enormous box-office success, and the impact this has had on rural cinemas, many of which reopened after COVID to show the film. How have the town’s inhabitants responded to the film’s success?
SIMÓN: I was very nervous to see how the villagers would respond. We released the film in Berlin first and they hadn’t seen it, not even my family had. Before shooting, the villagers had been a bit suspicious, thinking that we might want to mock them. They worried about people from outside making a film about them without knowing the place. It took us a lot of time to make sure that we were telling the story from the inside. When they finally saw it, it was a very important moment. A lot of the farmers came to me saying that they were happy with how they had been portrayed, and sadly, how true the agricultural situation was, how it was finishing as a family business. It was very beautiful to see how many people went to see the film in cinemas and how many cinemas [in rural parts of Spain], which had shut during the COVID pandemic, reopened to show Alcarràs.
NOTEBOOK: The film is shot in the dialect of the Lleida region. How important was it for you to film in dialect? Did it pose any challenges when it came to casting?
SIMÓN: For me it was very important. Catalan is a very minority language so a lot of energy is put into protecting it. But usually we protect just the standard Catalan. I wanted to try to tell a story in the way that they speak in the region, which is beautiful. It was a challenge for casting, yes, because there are actors from the region but not many. So many have also lost their accents when they moved to Barcelona to study. This aspect of the dialect was really important so in the end we just went with people from the region. The way I work is that we follow the script but I let the actors speak in their own way. There is a bit of improvisation. I couldn’t imagine an actor from Barcelona playing a farmer. It wouldn’t be the tone that I was looking for.
NOTEBOOK: Can you speak about the role that improvisation plays in making the film? You co-wrote the screenplay with Arnau Vilaró but the performers weren’t trained actors. How did you maintain control over the action?
SIMÓN: It’s a bit like a fight to shoot whatever has been written. I try to follow what’s in the script but I want everything to feel like it's happening by chance. It’s very important to create a strong relationship between the characters, to spend a lot of time together creating shared memories. I want to make sure that when we get to the shoot, there is a real intimacy between the actors. That way, we have improvised enough background stories that when we arrive on the shoot, it will make sense wherever we arrive in the story. Improvisation can go in any direction, but as I have been guiding them for over four months, when I let them improvise, everything still belongs to the same world.
It’s very hard to write in the way that we speak. We talk chaotically, but when we write we bring order. I wanted to maintain the chaos of real conversations. I told the actors to say things the way they would already speak. It’s important they don’t learn the script by heart. We just read it once. We rehearse the scenes, and they have to respect each other’s turns in talking, but they can say it in their own manner. When we are shooting I talk a lot. I guide them through my voice. They get used to listening to me but not looking at me. Then in post-production we take out my voice.
Summer, 1993 (2017).
NOTEBOOK: This is fascinating, sort of like silent cinema. How different is it directing very young children, as you do here and in Summer 1993? How do you find and work with them?
SIMÓN: It’s important to pick the right children, ones that can follow directions! They must be patient, and they have to want to be there, not just because their parents want them to make a film. I try to pick actors that are very similar to the parts that I have written, and it is the same for children. Because children cannot be someone that they are not. It was useful that Iris [Ainet Jounou] was a bit bossy, and that the twins are related in real life. Gloria’s daughter was three when we shot the film. If she didn’t want to do it, we had to find a way to make sure she was okay with it. You can’t force it. You have to be empathetic.
NOTEBOOK: What about working with the seasons? You were presumably limited to shooting in the summer with the peach harvest, but then COVID struck.
SIMÓN: Because of the pandemic, we stopped the production three months before we were meant to start shooting. We were about to start rehearsals. We thought we would be able to shoot before the end of that summer, but we had everything you shouldn't have to shoot in a pandemic: old people, very young people, lots gathered in one room. We would have had to make too many changes to shoot. The only time we have peaches is in summer, from June. We considered shooting in other seasons, with other fruit. But I knew I had to shoot in the summer: the family dynamics depend on it, because kids are not at school so it’s a time when all the generations are sharing more than usual. It’s also when the farmers that pick this sort of fruit are most nervous. You really have to pick peaches at the right time, otherwise it gets wasted. This was a nice premise to give to the character of Quimet. He learns that he has to leave the land at the beginning of the film but he cannot face these problems because he has to confront the harvest.
NOTEBOOK: Both Summer, 1993 and Alcarràs document folkloric festivals and ancestral traditions in their respective regions. How important is it for you to document traditions?
SIMÓN: These kinds of things are so normal to us, growing up in these villages, but when you look at it from the outside, it looks really strange! Folkloric practices also have magical thinking behind them, they capture the distinct rules of these places. They are part of the imagination of the peoples and of our country. In one way or another, we all have similar festivities [across Spain]. In Alcarràs, we see the fireworks festival and of course, the drinking of the porrón, both very typical of that area. It’s something that we are losing a bit because young people don’t know how to do it anymore. So it's good to leave a document of that. The dance parties, which are not folkloric but social events, are also about bringing people together. There is a strong sense of community that I find very beautiful to portray.
NOTEBOOK: Summer, 1993 is largely seen through the eyes of a child, while Alcarràs bifurcates the perspective to a whole family, showing different ways of confronting the same problem. Why was it important for you to broaden that perspective?
SIMÓN: When we started writing the story, I was talking a lot to my uncles [who are middle-aged farmers]. There was something that didn’t feel right about telling it from that perspective: I’m not a 45-year-old farmer! But I am part of a big family and I have always felt a great desire to portray what that means in a cinematic way. And I love ensemble films. I wanted to see how a family crisis affects everyone. The emotional energy that runs from one person to another in a very intense way. Up until now, I was part of the new generation, so that’s why their perspective, that of the childrens and teenagers, is more present. It’s very tough to build this, because we are drawing the emotional journey of a whole family, rather than a single character. I was afraid: how do you work on emotion when you don’t spend much time with each character? It was important to have very magnetic faces and actors that make you want to keep watching them. But there needs to be a structure from one character to another, so we can engage with all of them. This affected everything from where you put the camera to the editing.
NOTEBOOK: There’s a tendency in modern neorealist films to show young people fleeing villages for the city, but here, the threat to the family, and the local agriculture, is represented by renewable energy. Why did you choose to focus on something that for many represents progress?
SIMÓN: It was more interesting to have the reason that they have to leave the land be something that we need for the future. It introduces a complex moral dilemma. You realize that the guy who is telling them to leave wants something that you cannot condemn. Spain is a very big country so it doesn’t make sense to put solar panels on cultivated land. In the end, we are not against green energy. But it should not be done in a way that disrupts the land and its farmers.
NOTEBOOK: I’m curious about the role that immigration plays both in the film and in the agricultural practices it documents. We see largely African migrants working on the farm and the little girl has a touching encounter with one of the seasonal workers. There’s also a reference to Pinyol's Romanian girlfriend. But these perspectives are definitely secondary to the family’s. This is clearly a conscious choice. Did you consider bringing these experiences more into the story or was it always going to be focused on the family?
SIMÓN: That relationship was more present in the original script but at some point we polished it and took certain things out. This is a film about the family, the migrant workers should have their own film. At the same time this is a portrait of a place, so it was very important that they were present in the film.
I think a lot about this idea of a chain, that once the chain is broken it is broken for many people. If the family has to leave the land, it will also affect the people who come every summer to work with them. I am very curious about the relationships between these farming families and migrant workers: they work together every day, back to back, during nine, ten hours a day over the whole summer, but they don’t know anything about each other. It’s very strange: they need each other, and respect each other! They say that Lleida is a very racist place, which sometimes it is, but when you go there and see how these communities live together, side by side, I’m just not sure they are quite so racist. These communities just don’t integrate. That’s why I liked the story of this interaction with the little girl: unlike adults, children are curious about everything and everyone.
NOTEBOOK: I’ve seen Alcarràs placed, at least in the Spanish press, within a new wave of Spanish films taking an ambiguous position on rural life, that don’t romanticize it. I’m not sure. The film feels like a celebration of agrarian life, as does Summer 1993. What is it about the rural that interests you and why is it so important to your films?
SIMÓN: It’s my life. It is true we are talking a lot about rural life in Spanish cinema right now. Spain is a very rural country, and we have always had a lot of that kind of cinema. But maybe it’s because cinema has become a bit more democratic. There are more of us making films from these places, who have a desire to portray these places. My third film will be in a city. In the end, Alcarràs talks about the danger of these villages disappearing if we don’t take care of them. It’s not that young people don't want to stay. It’s that everything is so city-centered right now.
Alcarràs (2022).
1. Matthew J. Marr (2021), "Rural Homeplaces and the Roots of Affect in El olivo (2016) and Amama (2015)," Hispanic Research Journal, 22:1, 66-83.