Alcarràs review – an angry, urgent fight for family land in Catalonia

It’s more than a piece of land. A thriving peach farm in the rural heartland of Catalonia is also the fertile earth that sustains multiple generations of an extended family. It’s the repository of the stories passed down from weathered grannies in funereal black cardigans to each fresh branch of an ever-spreading ancestral tree. It’s the launchpad for games of imagination for Iris (Ainet Jounou) and her semi-feral twin cousins. It’s a perpetual battleground: the men patrol at night with shotguns and spotlights, alert for rabbit incursions into the orchards. And it’s on borrowed time.

At the start of Carla Simón’s terrific second feature (her first was the equally impressive 2017 drama Summer 1993) a bombshell drops: after the death of his father, the new owner of the land does not intend to honour the gentleman’s agreement that permitted the family to cultivate it for the last three generations. They can keep their house, he says. But after this year’s harvest, the trees will be grubbed out and replaced by solar panels. It’s such a devastating blow that it’s hard for the family members to comprehend.

So at first, life carries on as normal, denial temporarily damming up the realities that will change the land beyond recognition. But Simón’s acute eye shows how stress fractures appear in the family; how a domestic ecosystem can be as precariously balanced as a natural one. Persuasively lived-in performances – Simón cast nonprofessional actors from the region in which the story unfolds – give the Catalan-language picture both its urgent naturalism and its potent sense of anger and injustice.