After passing through the Berlin festival, where it won the Golden Bear, its presence in Malaga, the premiere last Wednesday at the Llotja de Lleida auditorium and the inauguration of D’A, the long-awaited ‘Alcarràs ‘, the second, bright, emotional and realistic second feature film by Carla Simón, a Catalan director who already had great success with ‘Estiu 1993’. The film is the portrait of a way of life that is disappearing and is carried out by non-professional performers from the area.
After the premiere of ‘Estiu 1993’ (2017), you said that while shooting that film you learned to look at what happens in front of the camera, not what is written in the script. Has it also been like that with ‘Alcarràs’?
Yes, I have applied the same. The difference is that with ‘Estiu 1993’ it had 35 hours of footage, and with ‘Alcarràs’, 90. There are scenes that are shot in a more conventional way, with one, two, three, 10 takes, whatever is necessary, but there are other moments when I liked to give the actors a little more space and that things could happen that were not so written.
What was the process of making the film? Did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to tell or did it come out of contact with the people of Alcarràs?
No, it was born before. The process is very similar to that of ‘Estiu 1993’ in the sense of looking for people who were close to the characters we had written. The idea came up in a way when I was writing ‘Estiu 1993’ and my godfather died. My family grows peaches in Alcarràs and when my godfather died it was a moment to value what he left behind, his legacy, and to think for the first time what would happen if those trees that have always been there, one day cease to be. At the end of the previous film, with María Zamora, my producer, we decided that the story of Alcarràs would be my second feature film, although it involved many challenges.
As which?
Build the choir. It is a portrait of an entire family, about 12 characters. And the fact of working with people from the area who are not professional interpreters. It was a somewhat risky decision, since the other idea he had was closer to what he had done in ‘Estiu 1993’. I started writing and I asked Arnau Vilaró to write the script together. He is from Bellvís, a town 20 minutes from Alcarràs, his relatives are also farmers and I thought that between the two of us we could tell this story more from the inside.
How have you incorporated family experiences?
The conversations with my uncles and with his family have been very important. It was also that we settled in my uncle’s farmhouse to write the script. It is a place where they only work. They arrived at half past six to work, we got up to the sound of the tractors, we went to see them, things happened that we later incorporated into the film. I remember that one day we were writing, we heard some screams, we went out, we saw that my cousin had dropped one of the boxes full of peaches and we helped him pick them up. We add that. We started the ‘casting’ without having closed the script. There are many concrete things about the world of peasants that we learned doing the interviews for the cast of the film. And from there also came the change in the ending. As my uncles continue to grow peaches, I wanted a positive ending, but I realized that nobody has a positive discourse in relation to this way, this model, of family farming.
It was clear from the first moment that the film would be starring non-professional actors.
No, in fact, there is a professional actress, Berta Pipó, who is my sister, she plays Gloria, the sister who comes from Barcelona. In ‘Estiu 1993′ she played a small role as the girls’ aunt. She also participated in the ‘casting’ process from the beginning, we have the same way of approaching the subject. For me it was essential that they were people from the area, that they had their way of speaking and that they gave us room to improvise some things. A farmer is a farmer, you notice it on the skin, in the hands, in how he moves.
“A farmer is a farmer, you notice it on the skin, in the hands, in how he moves”
The work with the interpreters is brutal. If you don’t know that they are not related to each other, you think they are part of the same family, there is a great complicity between all of them.
We worked on it a lot beforehand. When you’re not working with professional actors, you can’t come to the set and tell them this is your father, and this is your son, because they won’t feel that way. I rented a house in Horta de Lleida and they came every afternoon. We made combinations to weave all the relationships that made sense for the story we were telling. It was a kind of prequel to what the film would be, so that they would arrive on the set and nothing that we were explaining would be foreign to them. We did a script reading, but not for them to learn it, but to know what we were going to deal with. The script is written and we try to follow it, but always leaving space to integrate what happens in the shooting and not have the feeling that the script could only be said the way it was written.
I imagine they have told you, but the resemblance between the person who plays Quimet, Jordi Pujol Dolcet, and the actor Sergi López is total, not only physically, but also in the way of speaking, of moving. Did you have it in mind?
When I chose him, no, but then I did think that, if an actor had to do it, Quimet could be Sergi López. Initially I did not perceive this parallelism, but it is true that they do resemble each other.
“We are at a time when it seems that stories have to have empowered women, and there are places where this has not happened yet”
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The scene of the double slap that the mother gives the son and the father seems to me, in addition to being very significant of how this female character is, key to the portrait that it offers of this world and these relationships.
When you make a portrait of a certain place, beyond what you think of how the world should be, I think it is very important to learn to look at it, leaving aside your opinion as a filmmaker, even your aesthetic taste. We are at a time when it seems that all stories must have empowered women, feminists, who break with the heteropatriarchy, and there are places where this has not happened yet, or is happening little by little. It’s not that it doesn’t happen, my cousin, for example, is from the Alcarràs feminist assembly, but it was important for me to show how things are there. The women of the peasants do the housework and help in the fields, they put up with a lot. It was a difficult scene to shoot because Anna Otin, who plays Dolors, is very strong, but she was embarrassed to hit those who represented being her son and her husband.