Alcarràs: Small farmers take on environmentally themed capitalist greed

The second film from the award-winning director of Summer 1993 opens with idyllic scenes of children – namely Iris (Ainet Jounou) and her twin cousins, Pere and Pau (Joel and Isaac Rovira) – roaming around their family’s farm, making baskets into forts, and taking refuge in an abandoned car that they pretend is a spaceship.

The kids are rightly miffed when a crane later removes said vessel. It is a sign of things to come.

For decades, the Solé family has made a living picking the peaches in Alcarràs, a village in Spain’s Catalonia region. The clan has farmed the property since the Spanish Civil War, when neighbouring landowner, Pinyol, in return for refuge, made a gentleman’s agreement with the family. Years later, grandfather Rogelio (Josep Abad) is forced to concede that nothing – save for the tenancy of the house – was ever committed to paper. The younger Pinyol (Jacob Diarte) has struck a deal with an alternative energy company to replace the fruit trees with solar panels, and the Solé family is to be evicted.

The devastating news impacts in various ways. Rogelio’s son Cisco (Carles Cabós), turns lackey and attempts to ingratiate himself with the installers of solar panels. His brother-in-law Quimet focuses on harvesting the peaches, enlisting his adolescent children Roger (Albert Bosch) and Mariona (Xènia Roset) when cutbacks force him to let go of several migrant pickers. Despite the looming crisis, the teenagers continue to be teenagers: Roger is secretly cultivating weed; his sister is rehearsing a hip-hop dance.

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The first Catalan-language film to scoop the Golden Bear at the 72nd Berlinale – and certainly the first Bear-winner performed in Lleidatà, the western dialect of Catalan – utilises sunny vignettes as it moves toward a sorrowful, inevitable conclusion.

The effects can be slow-burning and occasionally a little shapeless, but they cast their dappled spell as the summer wears on

An entirely non-professional cast makes it seem as if the director-editor Ana Pfaff and cinematographer Daniela Cajias simply happened upon every beautifully composed sequence. The effects can be slow-burning and occasionally a little shapeless, but they cast their dappled spell as the summer wears on.

The film was shot over the peach-picking season in the village of the title, a place that made headlines during the 2017 Catalan referendum when the locals faced down the National Guard.

Its central theme, pitching traditional agriculture against industry, is made all the more thorny and compelling by that industry’s “green” nature. Environmentally themed capitalist greed turns out to be, well, capitalist greed.