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Carla Simón's Alcarràs is now showing exclusively on Mubi starting February 24, 2023, in many countries—including the United Kingdom, United States, India, Turkey, Ireland, and Brazil—in the series The New Auteurs.Alcarràs (2022).Although it unfolds in the languorous heat of high summer, life is not all peaches and cream for the farming family at the center of Alcarràs, Carla Simón’s lyrical second feature. The Solé family have been harvesting peaches in the titular village for decades, and, as the film so acutely portrays, working the land is no mean feat. Soft-fruit farming is a risky business: the fleshy crop spoils quickly and must be harvested fast. This sense of working on borrowed time is compounded by the situation the Solé clan suddenly find themselves in. With the old landowner dead, the new landlord plans to replace the ancient fruit trees with far more profitable solar panels. Served with an eviction notice,...

"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...