Somewhat unexpectedly, this Catalan drama about a family of peach producers from the Lleida area won the main prize at the Berlin festival, the Golden Bear. For Carla Simon, “Alcarras” was only the second feature film after “Summer 1993”, which at the same festival brought her the award for best debutant, as well as a nomination for European discovery of the year and the Goya award for best new director. Simon fully justified expectations with this naturalistic, almost documentary drama filmed in the Catalan language, for which she hired only non-professional actors, i.e. residents of western Catalonia.
They embodied the Sole family, who will find themselves in a serious problem when the owner of the land they have been living on for generations announces that they have to move out by the end of the summer. This family has been living on the land of the Pinyol family for who knows how long, and while the whole family is feverishly digging through the papers, the grandfather claims that in the past no documents were signed, but people kept their word. Clearly, times have changed and the word is worthless today, regardless of the fact that during the Spanish Civil War the Sole family hid a landowning family and in return received permission to live on their land forever. But the civil war has long since ended, who remembers the given words almost a hundred years ago, and the new young owner of the land where the Sole family has a peach plantation, plans to build a solar panel plantation.
It seems a bit ironic that the “villains” of sorts here are the solar panels, but the Sola family is given a choice – they can stay living there if they take care of the panels. Otherwise, let’s move on. Such a thing is not a choice at all for the pater familias Quimet, the oldest brother who stayed to live next to the plantation and engage in fruit growing with the help of his wife, 18-year-old son Roger, teenage daughter Marion and little daughter Iris. The peach harvest is just in progress, so along with African seasonal workers, Quimet’s family is helped by his sister and her husband with little twins, and in “Alcarras” we follow the last weeks of this family in the house and plantation that they consider their own and which actually represents life for all of them.
And Simon builds this masterfully and subtly from the beginning, not only the dynamics of the relationship between the family members, but also how slowly but surely their life is disappearing. In the first scene, we see three children playing on the plantation, when some kind of excavator comes and their playground begins to slowly sink. Of course, nothing is clear to semi-wild kids, they run around the ground barefoot all the time, play with fruits and vegetables, the corpses of rabbits that Quimet and Roger burn every night because they harm them, and they don’t hang out on their cell phones like most of today’s kids. In the beginning, this family seems harmonious, but as time passes, cracks in their relationships, differences in views on life will be felt more and more, and the sundial until the moment of eviction will tick faster and faster.
In fact, none of them mentions it and they all behave almost as they do every summer. They pick peaches, irrigate the land, and they are troubled by the standard problems like all other farmers because the purchase prices are nothing. Even without knowing that they have to move by the end of the summer, it’s obviously not easy for this family, but Simon did a great job because “Alcarras” is not one of those depressing, heartbreaking, pathetic dramas about unfortunate fates. Rather, this is a subtle observational drama in which it shows the life of a family, and it is performed in a special way.
Detractors would say that “Alcarras” is one of those films in which nothing happens, which is not far from the truth, because there are no particularly dramatic moments as you would certainly find if it were a Hollywood film. The characters are excellent, and although there are no big conversations, it becomes increasingly clear to us that they are aware that soon nothing will be as before, which is further suggested by the rapidly growing solar plant next to the pond that they use to irrigate their peach plantation. Indeed, “Alcarras” was a special, emotional and smart film in which, through the example of one family, some important topics are dealt with, such as the problem of ownership structures, the collapse of such small family plantations and the disappearance of life as it once existed.