- Criticism of ‘Alcarràs’ by Carla Simón
Carla Simón has made history with ‘Alcarràs’. At 35 years old, the Barcelona director has been the first Spanish woman to win the Golden Bear, the highest award at the Berlinale, at the recently held 72nd edition of the German festival. An award not received by a Spanish filmmaker since ‘La colmena’ by Mario Camus almost 40 years ago. It is an honor and cause for celebration not only for any Spanish movie buff but for the entire country, which should have gone out to celebrate in the streets as if we had won the European Championship.
The second film by the director of ‘Summer 1993’ will hit theaters on April 29, when more than four years have passed since it began to take shape. Like the fruits that the family in the film grows, ‘Alcarràs’ has undergone its own ripening process until it became so sweet that the Berlinale jury, chaired by M. Night Shyamalan, decided to sink their teeth into it.
The idea of ’Alcarràs’ was born with a death. That of Simón’s grandfather, a man who had dedicated his life to growing peaches in the city that gives the film its title, a town of 9,000 inhabitants to the west of Lleida, in the Segrià region. “My grandfather died when he was writing ‘Summer 1993’, and so we valued his legacy, those trees that he cultivated and now my uncles cultivate. And suddenly you get the idea of what would happen if one day that ended “recalls the director in a zoom conversation with Fotogramas.
The success of ‘Verano 1993’ is more than documented: Carla Simón’s debut already enchanted in Berlin in 2017, where she won the award for best first film and the grand prize of the international jury, and immediately went on to sweep the Goya , the Gaudí and the Feroz. Then Simón and the producer María Zamora (the first Spanish woman in this position to win the Golden Bear, by the way) decided to embark on the adventure of ‘Alcarràs’ precisely because it was a very different challenge from the previous film. “It had very different elements, such as that choral idea, that it was a big story and not just a point of view. We also wanted to do it with non-professional actors.”.
‘Alcarrás’ tells the story of a family, the Solé, who have been cultivating the land for a century. But the legitimate owner of the land has decided to sell it to a company that is going to install solar panels, which will force this family to exile themselves from their hundred-year-old home, an idea that divides the Solé between those who want to safeguard the tradition and those who have looking to the future. A dilemma that arose from reality when Simón began to investigate the subject: “When we started talking to the farmers in the area, we realized that the model of the family that farms together, which has been done since we humans existed, is something that is in crisis. They are very tired, there is no generational change, large companies buy land and it is no longer cultivated as a family… It is a world that is ending, and that is where the idea ended”. So the film became the portrait of a way of life, that of her grandfather, that is being lost.
Development and economic support
Thanks to the phenomenon that her first film represented, and to Zamora’s work as a producer, it wasn’t too complicated to put together ‘Alcarràs’. “We can’t complain at all because it was a very fluid process. After ‘Summer 1993’ all we asked was ‘yes’, and at the times we wanted”explains the director, who also highlights the importance of a development phase carried out in various international enclaves. “We went to the TorinoFilmLab program, a script development program, I also did the Cannes Résidence program, and then we went to the Co-Production Market in Berlin and they gave us an award. That’s where we found the sales people, who is mk2, and the co-producer who is Italian.”.
All that work was the irrigation that the seeds needed to grow strong. Simón acknowledges that ‘Alcarràs’ has had a larger budget than is customary in independent cinema in Spain. “A one-year casting is impossible with the budgets we have here”. That casting you are referring to occurred between the summer of 2019 and the spring of 2020. “We had to find 12 people who weren’t actors but who acted well. It was a ‘street casting’ process that consisted of going to all the major festivals in the towns of Segrià, Pla d’Urgell and the entire area, looking to see who fit the bill and inviting them to tryouts”.
And suddenly, pandemic
Then what no one saw coming happened: just when they were closing the deal, in March 2020, the pandemic arrived. Something that Simón herself defines as a “bitch”. “We were on point creatively, the project didn’t need any more time. For me it was catastrophic because we were three months away from starting to shoot, which is a moment where the whole team comes in, you are sharing all the ideas, you see that the movie materializes and you make many decisions. And there we stop”. As happened to all of us, there were several weeks of gradual realization in which Simón, Zamora and the team realized that they would not be able to record when they had planned. “The film talks about a harvest of peaches, and the peaches do not wait. The weeks went by and the dates no longer came out “.
To make matters worse, precisely that characteristic that distanced ‘Alcarràs’ from ‘Summer 1993’, its collaboration, seemed unfeasible after the arrival of the coronavirus. “The problem, although for me it was a virtue, is that the premise of the movie is a very large family that is together. So we had elderly people in their eighties, small children, and all together indoors and outdoors, all the time… There are tons of scenes with 12 people. It was everything that could not be done during the pandemic, but together”. They made a decision as painful as it was inevitable: to delay filming for the following year.
“We close the project and the folders and leave it on ‘stand by’”Carla Simón remembers now. Luckily, she was able to take advantage of the break to write another script that, she hopes, will become her third film. And then at the beginning of 2021, ‘Alcarràs’ was resurrected again, although he did it in a new world. They reopened the casting to look for some missing characters and to replace some of the children, who had already grown too much, but luckily they were just a few loose fringes. “I always think about what would have happened if we had done this casting in a pandemic, because I think it would not have been possible. Without major parties that have not been in the last two years, people with a mask, with the fear that we have of contact… Lucky that we did that job before “.
Against the clock to reach Berlin
The covid was a shadow that hovered over the film ever since. Three days after the start of filming there was a positive and they had to stop everything again, losing valuable days of a filming that was already against the summer calendar. The summer weather in the area didn’t make things any easier either. “We started shooting on June 1, which was not yet horribly hot. But we stayed until the end of July and they caught us very ‘heavy’ days of not being able to think about the heat”. More discomfort? “The mosquitos. Now we have made a whatsapp group with the whole team to celebrate a little and meet up to see each other, one said: ‘The mosquitoes won’t bite us in vain’. It was crazy”.
Working with a cast of non-professional actors was for the director the biggest challenge of the film, but also the “prettier” part. “Somehow they stopped their lives to do this, because they all work and have their families and their lives”. The casting was done trying to choose people who resembled the characters in the role, to facilitate the interpretation process for novices. “I thought: ‘Let’s see if we can find someone from the same family, a father and a son or a grandfather and a granddaughter… whatever.’ But it did not happen, and each one belonged to his father and his mother. And of his town. They didn’t know each other and we had to create a family.”. So Simón rented between February and April a house in Lleida to which the cast went every afternoon in groups, depending on the relationship: “One day the cousins, one day the brothers, one day the couple, one day the grandfather and the grandson… We were making combinations in relation to what made sense to build according to the relationships in the film. We improvised with things that were not in the script but were useful… and at the end of all this period they felt that it was already family”. So they read the script together for the first time, but only weeks before shooting began they rehearsed the scenes. In the film, the actors do not interpret a script line by line but develop scenes from general ideas.
Despite facing the usual setbacks of any recording, the stoppages due to covid and the inexperience of a very large cast that shared many scenes (“It was chaos, a beautiful chaos, but a chaos difficult to put in order at certain times”recalls Simón), the team finished within the agreement.
But anyone who knows how to shoot a film will know what it means to shoot in the summer in order to present the production at the Berlin Film Festival, which takes place in February. It’s a relay race, and after recording comes the editing process. “In the end, the editing takes longer, because when you edit you also need to stop, rest, digest, make decisions, show the film, have feedback… And all these processes are long”. To make matters worse, Carla Simón was infected two days after closing the assembly. Luckily, the Berlinale was so keen to bet on ‘Alcarràs’ that they allowed them to present it very last minute. “They waited a long time for us. They saw her at Christmas and on Three Kings’ Day they called us “. What a gift they received that January 6: the film would participate in the official section of the contest.
and history was made
The rest is history. ‘Alcarràs’ was screened at the Berlinale receiving applause and excellent reviews and ended up winning the Golden Bear. A recognition that Simón extends not only to the crew and cast, but to all the locals in the area where the film was recorded. “It’s nice because everyone feels very much theirs. It is an area that is a bit forgotten, nobody goes for tourism, nobody puts the focus there. People turned and collaborated offering everything”.
The festival’s jury recognized “their extraordinary performances, from child actors to 80-year-olds,” as well as “their ability to sensitively show the struggle of the family, and their portrayal of the connection and dependence on the land that surrounds us. surrounds”. ‘Alcarràs’ is the story of a collective struggle for legacy, for tradition and for the future. That is also cinema. And that is a film that exists thanks to the work of two women, the help of a community dedicated and the collaboration of partners who have invested much-needed money. “When you invest a little more, everything you have in mind as a filmmaker can be carried out in a more precise way”. This is how prizes are won, and this is the ground that Spanish cinema has to continue plowing.
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