That in 2022 the first thing that is said about a film, before thinking about it, is that it is deeply moving and that it is a miracle makes it very clear that we are facing something important. Today the premiere of ‘Alcarràs’, the film by Carla Simón. In case anyone is clueless, it is the second feature film by the director of ‘Verano 1993’ (2017), it won the golden bear at the Berlin festival and shows the daily life of a family of farmers from Alcarràs, a town in Lleida, who, after eighty years cultivating the same land, have to face their last harvest and a inevitable and imminent change of life. It reaches 169 theaters today and there are magnificent analyzes of it by critics who have seen it at press screenings, at the Berlin festival, at the Malaga festival or, last night, at the D’A Film Festival Barcelona ( yesterday opened its 12th edition with the film by Carla Simón as the opening).
However, it is very striking that both the public that has been able to see it at those festivals and the professionals who have spoken and written about it put in the foreground theor much that has moved them. Perhaps at another time, the need to focus on how profoundly moving ‘Alcarràs’ is would not have been so significant, so much so that no one feels shame or fear of exaggeration when attributing that miraculous status to it. But today the impulse to share, first of all, the emotions caused by a film is tremendously exotic. The bewilderment of the sweeping changes in the way of making and consuming films (and perhaps a certain revival of cynicism) have meant that, most of the time, rather than reaching their hearts and souls, we observe and analyze them from a rare distance. We look like entomologists instead of spectators, and it is something evident among professionals but also common among the public who share their opinions on networks. I don’t know when we began to see films as products and not as artistic works. Because some, even many, are products, of course, but not all. We talk about films in relation to how they are released, to whether theaters and/or platforms treat them well or badly, to whether they are successful or unsuccessful, to the position of their directors regarding the collective response to their work. We dissect them, until they are dry, in search of their themes, how they dialogue with the present (as if that were mandatory) and acting as judges on the timeliness of their approaches. Many times, we limit ourselves to composing a map of references, as if that mattered to anyone or the movies and those who make them deserve to be exposed. And we ventilate them quickly, we don’t allow them to leave a mark. And then ‘Alcarràs’ arrives and deactivates all that, and the first thing that comes out, even at the risk of sounding unprofessional, is to share how much it has moved us. And we are not too embarrassed to say that it is a miracle, that it’s an important movie, which moves us deeply. And that happens because it really is. It had been a long, long time since a film prevailed over the inertia of the times and returned to us with that intensity the possibility of genuine and shared emotion in a movie theater. And that’s where the miracle is.