Alcarràs, with its couple of thousands of inhabitants, lies at the edge of a small provincial town named Lleida, somewhere in the west of Catalonia. On a map, Lleida is at the halfway point of the road that connects Zaragoza and Barcelona, but, if we mean to be precise, it’s not quite halfway: it’s about 140 kilometers to get from Zaragoza to Lleida, and about 170 kilometers to get there from Barcelona. What’s certain is that, barring any traffic jams, it takes less than two hours to drive from either of these cities to Lleida (and so, to Alcarràs).

Of course, all of this is true. But it’s probably just as true to say that Alcarràs is in the middle of nowhere. And, in all honesty, there is no reason to go from a city like Zaragoza or Barcelona to Alcarràs. At the same time, it might be unfair to say that Alcarràs is a place that faces extinction. When one says that a place is going extinct, it’s self-evident that that place used to be – whereas Alcarràs, perpetually tied to Lleida, where everything happens, with an invisible chord, never really was.

This is where Carla Simón sets the plot of her latest film, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin this winter. Simón is no stranger to these kinds of locations – the plot of her debut feature (Estiu 1993, from 2017), inspired by the filmmaker’s childhood, is also set somewhere in rural Catalonia. But there are rather big differences between the Catalonias of the two films. In Estiu 1993, the protagonist’s nice adoptive-parents-in-the-making were the kind of hip, fresh and funky youth that would listen to jazz music on their terrace and who, like avant la lettre neo-rurals, chose the tranquility of raising chickens over the industrial bustle of the city. In Alcarràs, the protagonists are a family of farmers that have been cultivating peaches for decades. The difference between them is staggering. Even the type of Catalan spoken by the characters in  Alcarràs, with its regional tinge, typical of north-western Catalonia, doesn’t sound like the one in Estiu 1993[1]. 

This difference is amplified by the fact that the characters are played by unprofessional actors, picked by the director from the local community of the Lleida region. It’s a neorealist wager that the director doubtlessly ends up winning. There’s an undeniable directorial virtuosity in the way Simón guides her actors – this was already obvious in the extraordinary performances of the little actresses in her debut feature, and culminates here in the impeccable acting of her unprofessional actors. It’s the kind of virtuosity that, without distracting one from the film, makes you dream of ‘making of’ videos and other bonus features.

As for the story of the film, it’s rather simple: the Solé family is composed of three generations of farmers who harvest peaches in Alcarràs. When the owner of the land occupied by the orchard dies, his son decides to fell the peach trees and install solar panels in their stead, thus practically forcing the Solés to find other work at the end of the summer – and so this is the last one that they will spend picking peaches together. This narrative device does indeed imbue the film with a sense of immediacy, but the film doesn’t waste time creating tension around the question of whether or not the Solé family will manage to keep its orchard. (It won’t.)

The film also does a good job portraying the close relationship the characters have with the land that they cultivate. This relationship is not at all metaphorical or esoteric – it’s as concrete, immediate, and essential as can be for the identities that the members of the Solé family have constructed for themselves. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, Quimet, the head of the family, is asked by the new landowner whether he would like to work for him as a solar panel installer – a much easier and better-paid job. Quimet answers him promptly and proudly: “I am a farmer, not a panel installer”.

Simón chooses to let us watch the members of the Solé family at length as they go about their business – working, picking the fruit, taking their pallets into town, and so on. As much as it is a film about family, Alcarràs is also a film about work, as the director turns her attention to the not-so-sexy problems that farmers face. Like the fact that they’re being shoehorned by distributors, who offer them increasingly bad and unsustainable prices for their produce, which, in turn, makes them unable to hire the itinerant African workers whose labor the farmers depend upon. The scene of the protest, beyond acting as an opportunity in which the frustrations of Quimet and his son, Roger, are given a voice, also lets us understand that this loss of identity is not something that only the Solés face – sooner or later, it will come for most of the working class people in Lleida.

The members of the family relate to this loss in different ways. Quimet, who is constantly burning on the inside, looks like he might burst at any moment. His father, Rogelio, is often seen in a contemplative state – for him, the land tells all sorts of stories, about the Civil War, the White Terror, and the reconstruction and reconciliations that followed. Roger, Rogelio’s grandson, tries to dampen his insecurities regarding his own future by working from dawn until dusk, then partying until the next morning. Dolores, Roger’s mother, is more pragmatic, while her daughters tend to be more preoccupied with TikTok dances. Still, even though the end of the summer is rapidly approaching, scenes such as the dinner, where the members of the family are sitting together, don’t at all look like a funeral. On the contrary, they are full of candor and humor – the members of the family are laughing together, poking fun at each other,  gossiping about their neighbors and acquaintances, and they even get the chance to sneak in a nasty comment about Romanian women[2]. 

And if the film begins with a landscape – Simón has a particular sensibility for these types of shots of rural nature, whose distinctive beauty she repeatedly speculates –, Alcarràs ends with another such shot. Meanwhile, however, the summer is at an end as well, and a tractor is destroying the peach trees around the house, while the members of the family stand together and watch. Maybe, from now on, everything will change. But, at the same time, in Alcarràs, next to Lleida, halfway between Zaragoza and Barcelona, it seems that nothing ever really changes.

[1] Speaking of language, it’s notable that Alcarràs is the first Catalan-language film to win the top award at one of the “Big Three” festivals. That being said, I’d like to point out that the first film spoken in Catalan that had a notable festival run was released some years before Simón’s debut – and that’s Història de la meva mort (2013) by Albert Serra, which won the Golden Leopard in Locarno. Which begs the question: who would win in a battle – a bear or a leopard?

[2]  As it happens, the few thousand Romanians in Lleida make up the largest foreign community there. And this might be the time for me to mention the fact that Răzvan Rădulescu somehow managed to find his way onto the film’s end credits, somewhere in the special thanks section. Which allows for only one conclusion: Romanians really are everywhere.

Codrin Vasile

He studied directing at UNATC, where he wrote articles for Film Menu. He also wrote his degree paper on D.A. Pennebaker’s early filmography. He is interested in analog photography and video art. He hopes for a Criterion release of Shrek 2. He makes movies.