Yes, says filmmaker Carla Simón, the farmers in the Catalan countryside are also very stubborn. The Peach Farmer Family in Her Golden Bear Award-Winning Drama Alcarras put the heels firmly in the sand. For a reason: the uncluttered, familiar farm life is at stake as new landowners threaten to replace the peach trees with solar panels.
The 35-year-old Spanish, video calling from Barcelona, understands that peasant stubbornness well. She based the family in her film on her stepmother’s family. ‘Peasant stubbornness stems from the idea that farmers are part of a kind of resistance. They row against the tide, at least the small farmers about whom my film is about. They feel unprotected by the government, are not represented by politics. A painful truth for small family farms is slowly emerging in Spain: a relatively small piece of land that you farm with your family is no longer a sustainable business model. Too bad, because the land has been worked like this throughout the history of mankind.’
Farmer protests are topical in the Netherlands. This is where the mandatory limitation of nitrogen emissions is at stake. Do you see similarities?
‘I don’t know enough about the Dutch situation to make a comparison, but in Spain it’s about the small businesses that are threatened in their survival. People have to take to the streets to force higher prices for their products. It’s the well-known problem of the big fish eating the little ones. I hope that the increasing demand for organic agricultural products can be a solution for small farmers.’
When you look at the two films Simón has made, you get the feeling of leafing through her personal, moving photo album. Her beautiful autobiographical coming-of-age film Summer 1993 (awarded best debut in the youth film section in Berlin in 2017) she based it on the period in which both her parents died from the effects of AIDS. Simón, then 6 years old, ended up with family in Garrotxa, north of Barcelona. Alcarras she based it on the life of her stepmother’s peach farming family. ‘Alcarras is less plot-true than my debut, but the world in the film is real. My co-screenwriter and I spent a few summers on my uncle’s farm in order to write as faithfully as possible. I need to be able to feel a place to write well about it.’
How did your family react when you told them about your movie plans?
‘How hesitant, even though I’m family. Here in the countryside they regularly miss the connection with the rest of the country. They do not recognize themselves in the stories that writers or filmmakers tell. The first reaction is: they will laugh at us again. It took a while, but luckily that feeling disappeared.’
Alcarràs, the village where your film takes place, looks beautiful. And you based your film on childhood memories. How hard was it not to romanticize farm life too much?
‘Certainly if you’re not from the area, like my entire crew, the beauty stands out. The land is flat, which makes the sky look huge. It’s easy to marvel at sunsets. That’s why we did looking exercises in the beginning: the beauty is there (she points into the distance), but our beauty is here (she points to the immediate surroundings). The emotion of the characters was always a priority.’
Your family’s peach farm still exists, but the film’s ending is less hopeful. Why?
“Hope is in small things. The young boy who states that he would like to make the switch to organic farming, for example. But the lack of hope is above all my imagination of what is going on among the farmers in Alcarràs: they really have no hope for better times. They are now advising their children not to follow in their footsteps. We found Jordi Pujol Dolcet, the actor who plays the stubborn Quimet, during a farmer’s protest. During that demonstration I learned that the farmers are fighting for something that may be out of their reach, even though they want nothing more than a fair price for their products. I also saw few young people during those demonstrations: in everything the survival of the small farmer seems to come to an end.’
Italian inspiration
Carla Simón cites director Alice Rohrwacher as an important source of inspiration: animal film Le meravigli (2014) deals with, among other things, the romanticization of the countryside. ‘Her films feel like a mirror to me,’ says Simón. ‘She’s the Italian version, I’m the Spanish one. Our differences are small. Her films gradually shift towards a magical world, where my films remain in our reality.’