Interview

Carla Simón

Director of ‘Alcarràs’, Golden bear at the Berlinal

“I find the stories in what is around me and what I say must really matter to me”

We interview director Carla Simón, winner of this year’s Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival

“My way of working with the actors is that we spend a lot of time working on the conflicts between the characters“

Win­ning the Golden Bear at the Berli­nale has made Al­carràs the most an­tic­i­pated Cata­lan film of re­cent times. The pre-re­leases in Lleida, Barcelona and Málaga have cre­ated even more an­tic­i­pa­tion for this story of a farm­ing fam­ily from Al­carràs (Segrià), who make their last har­vest of peaches be­fore being forced to leave the land. Jordi Pujol Dol­cet, Anna Otín, Xènia Roset, Al­bert Bosch, Ainet Jounou and Josep Abad are some of the per­form­ers in this fic­tional story, who were se­lected in spe­cial cast­ings for non-pro­fes­sional ac­tors. They give life to a story that is also the his­tory of the peas­antry of the rural Ter­res de Lleida re­gion and of small fam­ily hold­ings threat­ened by an in­creas­ingly glob­alised world.

Was one of the goals of ‘Al­carràs’ to make peo­ple aware of what we con­sume?
Yes, ab­solutely. There’s still a lit­tle hope. It’s very dif­fi­cult to change cer­tain things, reg­u­lat­ing fruit prices so that farm­ers can know what they will be paid to­mor­row for the peaches that they pro­duce today. I think that as con­sumers who go shop­ping every day, we can be more aware of that. Glob­al­i­sa­tion in what we buy and eat doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s ab­surd that a farmer pro­duces a kilo of peaches for 15 cents and we end up buy­ing it for three euros and it’s not even from here... that should make us won­der what’s going on. I’d love it if peo­ple were to go to the su­per­mar­ket and ask whether the peaches are from Lleida or not after see­ing the film.
What’s your re­la­tion­ship with farm­ers and how did this pro­ject come about?
My mother’s fam­ily is all from Al­carràs. My aunts and un­cles grow peaches there. The idea came about when my god­fa­ther died. I was writ­ing ’Estiu 1993’. I set out to cel­e­brate his legacy and asked my­self what would hap­pen if those trees dis­ap­peared one day. My fam­ily still pro­duce and I hope their chil­dren will too, but when you look around, you re­alise it’s dif­fi­cult: more and more peo­ple are giv­ing up, there isn’t a gen­er­a­tional change in the sec­tor, they’ve had enough, they don’t know what they’ll be paid. The de­sire to make the film came from want­ing to por­tray this.
There’s a cer­tain revin­di­ca­tion of the pride in being a farmer.
Yes, in the end it’s a film that por­trays the world of farm­ing. It seems to me that it’s a very wor­thy pro­fes­sion, and even if you don’t aim to por­tray it, that pride and dig­nity comes through. They feel that way them­selves. The aim of the film was to revin­di­cate this way of fam­ily farm­ing, which is the old­est pro­fes­sion on the planet, be­cause we’ve been doing it since pre­his­tory, al­though some­how it’s now dis­ap­pear­ing.
After ’Estiu 1993’ you said that your life wouldn’t lead to more films, and yet here we are again.
’Al­carràs’ is not my per­sonal life, but my fam­ily’s. It’s a topic that in­ter­ests me. Not many things have hap­pened to me, I can’t do ’Estiu 1993’ in every film, but I find the sto­ries in what is around me. It’s very im­por­tant to me that what I say re­ally mat­ters to me. I want to feel a very strong de­sire con­nected to me per­son­ally, to my in­ter­ests, to my life, that leads me to ex­plain that. My life and cin­ema go hand in hand.
Does this ac­cu­rate por­trayal of this peas­ant fam­ily come from the fact that you know this world very well?
Its ’partly about por­tray­ing the fam­ily. I’m ob­vi­ously in­spired by mine, and Arnau Vilaró, the other screen­writer, is from Bellvís, a vil­lage near Al­carràs, and he’s also from a fam­ily of farm­ers. Every­thing we wrote comes from our fam­ily ex­pe­ri­ence and what we know from other fam­i­lies. We fol­low the script a lot, but the ac­tors don’t have that per­cep­tion. My way of work­ing with the ac­tors is that we spend a lot of time work­ing on the re­la­tion­ships, weav­ing the con­flicts be­tween the char­ac­ters. They don’t come to­gether at re­hearsals, but in cou­ples, grand­fa­ther and grand­daugh­ter, fa­ther and son, or what­ever. When we read the whole script through, I feel like they have a shared fam­ily mem­ory and they al­ready feel like fam­ily. After that, we re­hearse the spe­cific scenes. Then there’s an­other more im­pro­vised part.
Are the Dar­d­enne broth­ers one of your points of ref­er­ence?
I like the Dar­d­ennes. At cam­era level I’m not look­ing for the same thing, but they work a lot with non-pro­fes­sional ac­tors and they’re amaz­ing. My biggest point of ref­er­ence is Ital­ian ne­o­re­al­ism, it’s what I feel most con­nected to, and in the case of this film it was what we looked to most.
Did M. Night Shya­malan, chair­man of the Berli­nale jury, make any com­ment on the film? He makes very dif­fer­ent kinds of films.
He gave an amaz­ing analy­sis of the film. He greatly val­ued the work be­hind it in gen­eral, in all as­pects, both in nar­ra­tive con­struc­tion and in work­ing with ac­tors. It makes you see that when film­mak­ers are film lovers, they can un­der­stand any kind of film, even if they make an­other kind. Some­thing im­por­tant for me that the jury told me is that they were very sur­prised when the cred­its came up and they saw that all the ac­tors had dif­fer­ent sur­names. They re­alised they weren’t a real fam­ily.
How did you feel about re­ceiv­ing the Golden Bear?
It was very ex­cit­ing, it was like a kind of déjà vu. For ’Estiu 1993’ we were awarded the prize for best first film and it was the first award of the cer­e­mony. I was sit­ting more or less in the same place. It was strange to me that this was the last prize. It was al­most hard to be­lieve it was hap­pen­ing.
Does it make your head spin a lit­tle?
I want the movie to be re­leased. When we went to Berlin we were still fin­ish­ing the final edit, be­cause since we had shot it in the sum­mer and to get to the Berli­nale [Feb­ru­ary] we did a very fast and in­tense post-pro­duc­tion. Then we went to Málaga, and it was like a whirl­wind. It doesn’t make my head spin, it makes me want to start some­thing else.

in­ter­view cin­ema

The link between La Segarra and Italian neorealism

“My biggest point of reference is Italian neorealism,” says Carla Simón, who was born in Barcelona in 1986. With this cinematic inspiration and the spotlight placed on her own life experiences, family and environment, the filmmaker has begun to build a career that has no foreseeable limits. Her film ’Estiu 1993’ won the prize for best first film at the 2017 Berlin film festival. Now, the same international festival has awarded her film ’Alcarràs’ the Golden Bear. No film made in Spain has won the top award at any of the major international film festivals (Cannes, Berlin and Venice) for decades. It is little wonder then that the director refers to the Berlin festival as her “cinema home”. What makes films like ’Alcarràs’ so special is that they become home for everyone: people from all over the world will get excited by and empathise with the protagonists, a family of farmers from La Segarra.

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