Times they are a-changing in Alcarràs. Photo: Lluis Tudela

ALCARRÀS
Directed By Carla Simon
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆☆

THE Solés are an extended family of peach growers, living in on a small, run-down Catalonia farmstead surrounded by groves of fruit trees.

But their lifestyle is under attack from every angle: the prices the peaches command, issues with staff, keeping rabbits off their crops… it’s not an easy way to craft a living, but they are about to be confronted by something altogether more threatening: the demands of modern economics.

Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet) is the patriarch, who, with his family, are preparing to pick the summer crop. As the fruit ripens, the Solés are told that landowner Pinyol (Jacob Diarte) is going to evict them and they cannot do anything about it.

Quimet had inherited the right to farm from his father, who had a gentleman’s agreement with the current owner’s dad. But peaches are not bringing in the money and the landowner wants to replace them with solar panels, farming the sun instead of its fruitful bounty.

Quimet cannot see a future he wants part of, the offer to retrain as a solar panel engineer coming across as insulting rather than a genuine attempt to help.

The family’s unity is threatened: Quimet’s sister and brother-in-law think the solar panel idea could offer a better deal, while his sons plans for increasing peach production are also dismissed.

While the beautiful, arid Catalonia countryside is charming to gaze on, it also has a lingering sense of exhausted malignancy. The romantic relationship between the farmer and nature is broken. From Quimet’s shooting of the rabbits to the failure to irrigate in new ways, the exploitation of hired pickers mimics how Quimet is exploited by those from above – this is no rural idyll.

Instead it shows the hard graft agricultural workers face. This is laden with nostalgia for a simpler time, tempered with an honesty about what that life now means.

Supported by a great cast of non-professional actors, this story is about people whose economic worth is based on an ancient peasant system.

Writer Normal Lewis spent three summers in the 1950s in a Catalonia village called Farol, and his book Voices of the Old Sea, is a masterful consideration of lives in Catalonia being bent and moulded by outside pressures. Carla Simon’s film has an air of Lewis’s lyrical work, telling a similar story, 70 years further down the line.