Tag: Carla Simón

Alcarras

Posted on by victorfraga

Hailed as “the Spanish film of the year”, and the first such movie in four decades to win the much-coveted Golden Bear (the last one being Mario Camu’s La Colmena, in 1983), Alcarras portrays the tribulations of the Solé family as they face the biggest challenge of their lives. They live in a large farm in the titular Catalonian municipality, and their existence is entirely devoted to growing peaches. The trade is as deeply rooted into the heart of the family as the fruit trees into the fertile soil of the mountainous region. Various generations inhabit one single farmhouse at the heart of the plantation. Their traditions are decades-old. Perhaps centuries-old. But this is all about to change.

Grandpa Rogelio (Josep Abad) reads an eviction notice to the incredulous family members. His son Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet) blames the old man for the tragedy because he never registered the land deeds at the local notary, allowing the greedy Pinyols to take control. The teenagers and small grandchildren carry on playing, prancing around and dancing to pop music. They remain mostly oblivious to the dangers and the uncertainties of the future. The family can scarcely conceive their lives outside their tiny and yet firmly structured world. The prospects of vacating their property are unfathomable yet seemingly inevitable.

Instead of concentrating on the legal technicalities of the struggle between tradition and modernisation, Alcarras is instead driven by a persistent sense of belonging. The family are physically and emotionally emotional attached to the land and the farmhouse within. The entire film is dotted with trivial actions bursting with authenticity. It opens with the children driving an abandoned car as if it was a spaceship. Relatives throw each other in the swimming pool. Adult males pour wine directly down their throat during a boisterous drinking competition. The camera swiftly travels through the peach trees, capturing the grazing cows and rabbits gently crossing the fields. Everything tastes and smells of countryside and tradition.

This fragile equilibrium is disrupted by moments of intense tension. The legal owner of the land, wealthy business Joaquim Pinyol (Jacob Diarte), digs up the trees and install solar panels in the farmland, triggering a violent reaction from the family. The price of each peach has been driven so low (just €0.15) that their production has become unviable. The Solés and other local farmers protest with placards, chants and also by dumping a lorry loaded with peaches on the streets, and then crushing the fruit with the wheels of the vehicle. A symbolic gesture of self-immolation. The teenagers take the matters into their hands, too: they lay dead rabbits outside the door of their rich tormentors.

Despite winning the prestigious Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, Carla Simon’s sophomore feature, which was written by the director alongside script supervisor Arnau Vilaro, is vastly inferior to her debut Summer 1993 (2018). The new film contains too many prominent characters, preventing the filmmaker from deep-diving into the individual mindsets, while also convoluting what could have been a fairly straightforward plot. The outcome is a far less visceral drama, more concerned with the collective issues of a community than with the subtle nuances of each character, and the psychology of the leads. What both films have in common is the outstanding performance from the non-professional child actors, and a palpable sense of rural realism.

Alcarras is entirely spoken in Catalan and it became the subject of an unlikely controversy when it showed in Catalonian theatres earlier this year. Nationalists criticised the presence of Castilian subtitles because they believe that all people living in Catalonia should be fluent in the regional language. It isn’t just the Catalonian farmers that are passionately attached to traditional values. Both land and language are integral elements of a people’s culture.

Alcarras showed in the Perlak section the 70th San Sebastian International Film Festival/ Donostia Zinemaldia, when this piece was originally written. It also showed at the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, January 6th. On Mubi is March (2023). Also available on Amazon Prime.

Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993)

Posted on by victorfraga

HIV first appeared in Spain in 1981. The virus – primarily spread by needle-sharing among drug users in the nascent democracy – peaked in 1997, when there were around 120,000 diagnoses of HIV/AIDS in the adult population. Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón was born in 1986 and is one of many orphans whose parents died from HIV when she was a child. Her debut feature film Summer 1993 is a biographical piece directly inspired by her experiences as a newly-motherless six-year-old girl during a balmy summer in 1990s Catalonia.

The film opens with six-year-old Frida (Laia Artigas) leaving her mother’s apartment in Barcelona to stay in the countryside with maternal uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer), aunt Marga (Bruna Cusí) and four-year-old cousin Anna (Paula Robles). Under the instruction of her grandmother Maria (Isabel Rocatti), Frida regularly leaves offerings and repeats the Lord’s Prayer at a woodside Virgin Mary shrine. All the while, the young girl is trying to make sense of her situation and the multitude of emotions it entails – confusion, grief, anger, to name a few. Equally, her surrogate parents are doing their best to balance sympathy, a fair upbringing, and grandma and grandpa’s regular visits to their bereaved granddaughter.

The narrative unfolds entirely from the perspective of Frida, as hushed fragments of adult conversations are picked up for both her and our dissection. For example, it’s not ever entirely clear that HIV catalysed her mother’s death from pneumonia; this can only be pieced together with a mature understanding of the adult’s behaviour. Cinematographer Santiago Racaj’s camera often assumes the level of Frida and occasionally replicates her point of view. When it frames Frida herself, she is often isolated, whether through her own volition or because of the avoidant actions of those around her. Longer shots are accompanied by handheld moments; altogether, this is a camera that lives in and observes the painstaking realities of its child subject’s world.

Summer 1993 burns slowly across the screen, subtly peeling back the complex and conflicting layers of grief in all their human totality. It never shies away from the more difficult manifestations of family bereavement – the selfishness and spitefulness that can emerge as a way of coping with the sheer injustice of having your life-giver and protector torn away. It lays out an honestly brutal array of emotions, without any place for sentimentality or idealistic happy-endings. The relationship between Frida and her younger cousin Anna provides a perfect example. They play with each other in a recognisably child-like way, yet the power relations between the older and younger girl are omnipresent, sometimes escalating with quite serious consequences.

Simón has spoken about her surprise at the universal appeal of the film, that a story set in Catalonia has led to messages from other people across the globe who were also orphaned after HIV/AIDS-related parental deaths. I would go further and suggest that Summer 1993 captures grief precisely, regardless of age or culture. In fact, to see it depicted through a child’s eyes allows just the right distance to analyse one’s own emotions around death (or those of someone close to you). It’s a fantastic debut and well-deserving of its film festival success.

Summer 1993 is on Mubi on Thursday, January 5th (2023). Also available on other platforms.