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"A poignant, rippling study of an extended family." Mubi has revealed the US trailer for the award-winning Spanish film titled Alcarràs now set to open in January in limited theaters. This film first premiered at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival among a very bad line-up, and won the top prize Golden Bear in February there. The life of a family of peach farmers in a small village in Catalonia changes when the owner of their large estate dies and his heir decides to sell the land, suddenly threatening their livelihood. It tells the story of a hard-working peach-growing family in Lleida, Catalonia, in rural north east Spain, whose way of life are condemned to oblivion when an old verbal Spanish Civil War pact on the land is ignored and they are faced with eviction. Starring Jordi Pujol Dolcet, Anna Otin, Xènia Roset, Albert Bosch, Ainet Jounou, Josep Abad, Montse Oró, Carles Cabós,...

Big agriculture and a renewable energy company (of all people) threaten the livelihood of a Catalonian peach farming family in Alcarràs, Carla Simón’s latest sunny pastoral and her first since the 2017 debut Summer 1993. Alcarràs is set in the present day, though you’d hardly notice, and like many of its characters it looks towards the past. That idea––that time has a way of sometimes flattening out––feels central to Simón’s film and distinguishes it from similar works of social realism: Alcarràs appears simple, even slight at first, but is deceptively far-reaching; enough at least to have impressed a Berlinale jury led by M. Night Shyamalan (and including no less than Ryusuke Hamaguchi), who collectively awarded Simón the Golden Bear.

It isn’t difficult to imagine as nimble and precise a writer as Shyamalan appreciating the simplicity and quiet expansiveness of Simón’s film. It centers on three...

Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs” shares its name with the tiny Catalonian town where her parents grow peaches, and — much like her nostalgically effervescent debut, “Summer 1993” — the title proves instructive. For all of the memorable characters who scramble around Simón’s fiercely unsentimental portrait of a family on the brink of losing their farm (along with the shared identity that has rooted them to its soil since before the Spanish Civil War), this is at heart a story about the land on which it’s set. It’s whose unruly cast pulls our focus in a dozen different directions at once, but also one that always returns our attention to the earth shifting under their feet, and in turn to the question of who they will become once they’re forced away from it.

As with most of the truly valuable things in this world,...

The Sole family grows peaches. Round white peaches ripen first; then the flat white peaches that supermarkets like; then yellow cling peaches. Their farmhouse is surrounded by the plantation they have tended for three generations, promised to them in perpetuity by the current owner’s great-grandparents during the Civil War. Memories are long in their corner of Catalonia. Nobody remembers a time before peaches. Harvesting determines the rhythm of their rumbustious family life. When the fruit ripens, it’s all hands on deck.

Director Carla Simon, whose radiant film Alcarrás has just won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, grew up in the region of Catalonia where this film is set: Alcarrás is the name of the nearest village. Her own uncles grow peaches; the film glows not only with sunshine and her love of this country and its ways, but real, hard knowledge of how farming as...

You can practically smell the midsummer fatigue that wafts through “Alcarràs” on the faintest and most occasional of breezes: a mixture of sweat, baked earth and ripe, plump peaches, inviting in the moment but suggestive of future spoiling. All simple seasonal pleasures are on borrowed time in Carla Simón’s lovely, bittersweet agricultural drama, and not just because winter is inevitably coming. For the large, garrulous Solé clan, who have spent every summer of their lives picking fruit from their familial orchard, this looks to be the last in that tradition, as they face imminent eviction from their patch of land in Catalonia. Yet as they squabble over their uncertain future — and plenty else besides — the sun shines and peaches droop voluptuously from endangered branches. There’s nothing for it but to complete the final harvest.

In her second feature, Catalan writer-director Carla Simón returns to the rural region that...

The 72nd Berlin International Film Festival (February 10-20) revealed its Competition line-up on Wednesday, scroll down for the full list.

As previously announced, the International Competition opens this year with François Ozon’s Peter Von Kant. Joining the Ozon pic today were 17 further features, including new films from Hong Sang-soo, Claire Denis, Ulrich Seidl, and Rithy Panh.

This marks Denis’ first time in Berlin’s Competition, having been a regular at Cannes over the years, while her last film High Life debuted at Toronto. The director’s new movie Both Sides of the Blade (previously known as Fire) stars Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon.

South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo picked up the Silver Bear for Best Director in 2020 for movie The Woman Who Ran. His latest pic is The Novelist’s Film, which Berlin Artistic Director today said celebrates chance encounters.

The Competition program is 17 world premieres plus one international premiere,...