Alcarras, by Carla Simón, has won the Berlin Golden Bear 2022. The 35-year-old filmmaker is the first Spanish director to win a major festival, and as her debut, summer 1993, he does it with a film attached to his family and to the land. M. Night Shyamalan, president of the jury, spoke of the marvelous combination of actors amateurs of several generations and its mixture with a camera glued to the ground.
On stage, Simón recalled the struggle of his family and other farmers to remain faithful to that land and that crop that they still do with care and affection. And he recalled the difficulty of making a choral film marked by harvest times in times of pandemic.
Carla Simón’s career started right at this contest, in February 2017, when Summer 1993 It won the award for best first film in all the sections, after also winning the award for best feature film in the section in which it participated, Generation Kplus. With Alcarras, which will be released in Spanish theaters in the spring, the filmmaker has continued to explore her own story and that of her family, on this occasion her mother’s, dedicated to growing fruit trees in an artisanal way, a business that is experiencing its last days due to falling prices . “I felt a very strong desire to portray a world that is ending, the one that lives by collecting peaches and Paraguayans,” she said in Berlin.
Hence the title, after the city where his cousins and uncles reside (the film is also a tribute to his deceased grandfather): Alcarràs, a town of 9,000 inhabitants to the west of Lleida, in the Segriá region, which lives mainly of fruit cultivation. “Given the current times, farmers are convincing their children not to continue with the fruit, because they buy it at a price lower than its cost. No matter how much youthful passion there is, its end is clear, ”said the filmmaker.
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Simón’s camera goes from one point of view to another, from character to character, in an organic way so that the viewer understands all the members of a fictional family, who sees how they have lost their fruit trees —which will be replaced by plates photovoltaic—because they did not have a written use agreement with the owners. And the fascinating thing is that the protagonists are played by people from the region, who are not actors and do not know each other. “We did a selection process among almost 9,000 people. We went through the major festivals from town to town looking for who could embody each character for a year, before the pandemic, ”Simón recalled. The health crisis stopped filming. “Once chosen, in the post-pandemic, I brought them together to rehearse in pairs and different possibilities: one day the grandfather and granddaughter, another the brothers-in-law, another the three brothers… And we improvised possible family situations so that they would create ties.” Alcarràs It could only be filmed in the summer months, when peaches and Paraguayans are harvested, and that is why the team had to wait until the summer of 2021 to make the film.
the other winners
The Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize was won by Novelist’sFilm, by South Korean Hong Sangsoo, a regular on the festival circuit with his small, almost casual black-and-white films that talk about life and love. The jury prize went to gem cloak, of the Bolivian-Mexican, by Natalia López Gallardo. She has made her big debut with a drama about entrenched violence in Mexico that she directs, writes and edits. It is also true that the filmmaker has a long career behind her as editor of the films of Amat Escalante, Lisandro Alonso and her husband, Carlos Reygadas.
The Silver Bear for the best direction went to the French Claire Denis, for her Avec amour et acharnement, which unfortunately is not his best film. In it, Juliette Binoche plays an almost perfect woman, a radio host with a socially committed program, a faithful lover and companion, who financially supports her partner (Vincent Lindon), but who enters a spiral of emotional destruction and throws herself into the double plays as soon as her ex (Grégoire Colin) appears, who was also her husband’s best friend.
The Berlinale awards two acting prizes without distinction of gender. The jury chaired by M. Night Shyamalan and which included, among others, the French producer Saïd Ben Saïd, the Japanese director —and man of the moment— Ryûsuke Hamaguchi or the Danish actress Connie Nielsen, decided to choose for the best leading performance Meltem Kaplan, who in Rabiye Kurnoz vs. George W Bush gives life to a Turkish mother settled in Germany who fights to get her son out of Guantanamo, where he spent years unjustly imprisoned. The libretto, which illustrates a real case, also won the Silver Bear for best screenplay for its author, Laila Stieler. Unfortunately, it is shot with telefilm makings. As a secondary performance, the Indonesian Laura Basuki won, who plays a butcher and lover of the husband of the protagonist of Nana, a film definable as a wishing to love for starters.
The Cambodian Rithy Pahn, specialized in his cinema in pursuit of historical memory, won the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution by Everything Will Be Ok, a movie inspired by Rebelion on the farm and with an ugly final anti-vaccine detail, and that is far from his best works, such as The diminishing image.
cold environment
It has been a cold Berlinale. Not so much because of the weather, which in the end has shown a kind face, without rain and with 1 or 2 degrees of temperature at noon, which would seem like a German spring, as with the daily antigen tests, obligatory for everyone who entered a contest venue: from contest workers to filmmakers, including journalists or members of the film industry. As the European Film Market was not held in person but online, there was much less atmosphere in the restaurants, bars and streets adjacent to the Berlinale Palast. Movie theaters had their capacity reduced by half, which also did not help film passions or applause or boos at the screen.
Finally, the Official section, which in the Berlinale is called Competition, has been quite disappointing, something that has surprised us because last year, when the contest was held online, there was a very good level (and many films decided not to accept that format at waiting for other face-to-face events).
The Berlinale has been held since 1951. In its first edition five Golden Bears were awarded, between 1952 and 1955 the winner was chosen by the public, and since 1956 an international jury selects the winners. Spain has a unique record: in 1978 the jury chaired by Patricia Highsmith decided that Spanish films were so good that the Golden Bear went to the entire delegation, which was made up of The trout, Jose Luis Garcia Sanchez; Max’s words, by Emilio Martínez Lázaro, and the short film Lift, by Tomas Munoz. Previously, there had already been a Spanish winner: in 1960 the Golden Bear went to The guide of Tormes, Cesar Fernandez Ardavin. Subsequently, there have been two other successful Spanish filmmakers at the Berlinale: Carlos Saura won the Golden Bear with hurry hurry in 1981, and Mario Camus with Beehive in 1983. In 2009 the Peruvian Claudia Llosa won it with the scared tit, film with Spanish majority production that even reached the Oscars. It has always been a festival that is very open to Latin American cinema, and has also received many awards.
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