Film director Carla Simón has won Catalonia's first Golden Bear, the award for best film at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, with the film Alcarràs. "I can't believe it," Simón said as she stepped on to the stage to collect the prize, which is the most important award of the Berlinale. The Catalan director dedicated the award to the families who work the land, an occupation that she considers to be "a form of resistance". She told the audience that part of her own family grows peaches in the locality of the film's title, Alcarràs, in Catalonia's Lleida province. The movie, filmed in Catalan, tells the story of a family spending their summer picking peaches. It is what they do every summer - but this year is the last harvest, because the owner of the land they have cultivated for decades wants to switch to a more lucrative and ecological business: solar energy. Alcarràs exudes the nostalgia of a final summer, between peach crates, family arguments and village festes. When the film was screened at the Berlinale on Tuesday, it received a standing ovation, hinting at the success which would follow just 24 hours later. "Poignant and rippling" is how Variety magazine described the film, which "balances a bristling political conscience against its tenderly observed domestic drama."
As with the Catalan director's first feature film, the story has its basis in personal experience: the death of her grandfather. "For me, family farming is in danger of extinction and it is model that must be protected, because there is no one better than a family to take care of their land... When a big company comes in and takes over a lot of land, it will never take so much care of the land as a family that loves it," explains Simón, asserting the "small is beautiful" ethic of Leopold Kohr. The cast of the film are all non-professional actors, chosen in a casting process that lasted more than a year from among 9,000 candidates that she found, taking advantage of the annual festa major village celebrations in the local counties of Segrià, Urgell and Pla d 'Urgell. Simón believed that in this way she could achieve authenticity, and it seems to have been appreciated by the Berlinale jury.
Alcarràs is Simón's second feature film, after she made her name with the even-more autobiographical Estiu 1993 ("Summer 1993"), which was a success with critics and audiences. The director's opera prima was the story of a young girl who lost her mother to an illness, and went to live with her uncle and aunt in the country. In 2017 it received the award for best first feature at the Berlinale.