Watching Alcarras, you can just about smell the peaches ripening in the orchards near the Catalan village for which the film is named. It is summer; the pickers are out in force, pulling down the pink and golden fruit.
As a child, director Carla Simon spent her holidays in this untouristed area staying on her uncle’s farm, exactly the kind of family business her film shows as under constant threat from agribusiness and other corporate raiders. “I always had a desire to shoot in this place,” she says. “I guess I love the rural world, I find it very poetic. But I wanted to show a portrait of the area and I felt I didn’t know enough.” So she and co-writer Arnau Vilaro spent summers living in the family home, watching and writing incidents into the script as they happened. The result is an immersive experience that deservedly won the Berlin Film Festival’s top award, the Golden Bear.
Ainet Jounou, one of the non-professional actors, in Alcarras.Credit: Lluís Tudela
Local recruits – former farmers, a high-school teacher, children who were on holiday during filming – play three generations of the Sole family, who live on the land they farmed and nurtured for a century or more. They do not own it – the current owner has lived in the city all his life, occasionally visited by his tenants with gifts of produce – but Grandpa Sole’s understanding with the owner’s father was that because they sheltered him from the Republican soldiers during Spain’s Civil War, the Sole family were their friends and tenants forever. He is blindsided by the news that they will be turfed off the land at the end of the season: the land has been leased to a solar panel company. His harried son, Quemet, who now runs the farm, blames him for failing to insist on a contract. Of course he didn’t. A debt of gratitude is not a contract.
The end is foretold at the very beginning of the film: the Sole family is condemned to lose what is both a livelihood and a way of life. “When we started writing, there was more of a plot – will they keep the land or not? – and a happy ending,” says Simon. “But at some point we realised this was just naive. The farmers there are really resigned to losing their land because this is what is happening to everyone.” So she abandoned her Hollywood underdog story to concentrate on Quemet’s anxiety, his wife’s stoic resistance, their brother-in-law’s betrayal as he casts about for another job, the way their teenage children lash out under pressure, hardly knowing why. That style of film-making suited her better, anyway.
“I like to study the characters, their relationships, their smallest gestures. So I think that when you have a set-up where you know what is going to happen at the end, it gives you space to explore the crisis,” she continues. “It was really hard to write Alcarras because there are so many characters. We treated the family as a body that goes through an emotional journey of accepting what is going to happen, but obviously the emotions they feel are different according to their age, their generation, their place in the family. The challenge was to understand who we were within every moment.”
Josep Aba and Ainet Jounou in Alcarras.Credit: Lluís Tudela
The unsigned contract is the writers’ invention, but she says there are many similar cases. “In Spain there was never a law to deal with landowners dividing their land: everyone you meet has had some kind of property problem at some point. During the Civil War there was a lot of this because some families were leaving and others were taking up land – and even if it feels very long ago, the war is still very present in this place, which is right on the border between Catalonia and Aragon. People still talk about it, and you can see it in the landscape, which is why it was important to talk about it.”
All but one of the roles are played by non-actors, discovered locally and speaking a regional variant of Catalan. “We spent more than a year looking for them. Luckily it was before COVID, so we could go to all the village festivities and interview people and invite them to come to auditions.” There were thousands: her hope was to find a single family that would correspond to the roles she had devised, but that didn’t happen.
Instead she cast her players and rented a house where they would come after work or at weekends, hanging out or playing out scenarios that could have happened before the events of Alcarras. Slowly, they built the intimacy of a family together. At the end of that time, they started rehearsing her script.
There were moments of chaos, but Simon held the faith that it would work. “I think what they all had in common was that they were all very daring people, willing to do something out of their comfort zone. This was something they all shared, somehow: they saw it as an adventure, something that wouldn’t happen to them again, something new. But for me, it is very important that when you cast people who are not actors that they are people who really want to make the film. One of the difficult ones to convince was the grandfather, but he knew my grandfather. I think that helped a lot. He felt the commitment was bigger for him, somehow.”
Simon, 36, has lived in Barcelona since reaching adulthood, apart from a few years in London attending film school, but she grew up on another uncle’s farm where she set her first film, Summer 1993. That film, which was Spain’s Oscar nominee in 2017, told her own story: how she was sent at the age of seven to live with relatives after her parents both died of AIDS-related illnesses.
She loves being back in rural Catalonia. “I love it because it brings me back to my childhood and I feel somehow so much more free,” she says. “Things happen in a different rhythm there. You need something, you just go and talk to someone. Everything flows, in a way. And everyone was so open to help.”
She can’t imagine living in a village like this one now, she admits, because she would miss going to the cinema. Maybe. The glow of light through the peach trees, as seen in Alcarras, presents a glorious alternative.
Alcarras opens on July 27.