The Berlinale surrenders to 'Alcarràs', the new and beautiful prodigy by Carla Simón, the director of 'Summer 1993'

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The French critic and filmmaker

--whose desperate reflections on 'The Cinema Hypothesis' inspire a large part of the hidden and enlightened program 'Cinema in Course' that

heroically and pertinaciously brings forward in Spanish high schools-- was convinced of the need to create a link between making and watching movies.

Theirs had a lot of new pedagogy, pending revolution, but also attitude in front of and behind both the screen and the camera.

And if they rush me out of life.

For whatever reason, she has spent years committed not so much to making movies, but also to sculpting looks.

And we are not talking about easy poetry, which perhaps also, like the hard work at the point of a chisel to extract from the stone everything that is left over so that the image, as if it were a sculpture, emerges freely, without impositions and, above all, , beautiful.

It is cinema that is seen, but that is made at the very moment of being contemplated;

It is cinema that is shot, that is made, but that demands to be seen in a primal way.

For the first time and, as Dreyer said, forever.

'

' is the best example of all of the above and, why not, of a good part of everything to come.

The film presented on Tuesday in the Official Section of the Berlinale is, as they say sound engineer Eva Valiño exclaimed as soon as she saw it for the first time, a revolution, a monument, one of Michelangelo's yawning slaves freshly extracted from the hard marble of the reality.

It is cinema that is made and unmade in front of the spectator's gaze as

It is cinema that makes us better.

Let's say that it is such an unlikely and scarce cinema, so delicate and unique, that before it only enthusiasm remains as a more or less sensible and moderate reaction.

To situate ourselves, the director of

that brought so much good news to what we generically call cinema, takes a few steps further.

The temptation to compare one film to another is great, and I will not be the one to avoid it.

Now everything looks radical and completely stripped of all artifice.

There are no actors.

Or, better, those that exist interpret themselves with such zeal that any border between fiction and reality appears on this occasion as an insult.

Nor does the film take refuge in the frightened innocence of a child as in the previous film, nor does it resort to the tortured autobiography to from there, from the instinct of emotion, disarm any barrier or suspicion.

Now everything that is seen is made, is built, in the very act of filming and only what bears the handprints acquires the privilege of vision.

An image of 'Alcarràs', by Carla Simón.

Solé family life is told.

One summer, Grandpa stops talking.

The reason is that all of them, the three Solé generations, are about to be dispossessed of the land they occupy and on which they plant peaches and Paraguayans (or were they Paraguayans?), hunt rabbits, cook snails, shout at each other, push each other in the pool, laugh in waves, dance '

and, the little ones, play war, which, as one of them says, "is very hard".

(Pause.

There is no paper that attests to the assignment that long ago made it possible for them to live where the Solé live and now the old owner, the one who does have papers, wants to plant solar panels.

Also clean energy can stain.

In Alcarras.

Alcarràs, memorize the name.

Alcarras.

What follows is the story of a cataclysm.

And of a fight too.

And even, and this is what is relevant, of a hope that is lost.

It's a family story of resistance, it's a film story that refuses to let go.

It is cinema that makes a look and is made with the look.

The camera moves between the bodies while raising dust clouds of issues such as truth, pain and laughter.

What counts is not so much the story arranged on the screen as a Greek tragedy in three fiery acts, as the other.

And that other has to do with the making of the first paragraph.

In fact, the film (understand well) is built only in front of the gaze and at the very moment of being contemplated.

There is no separation or barrier.

The screen yields, falls, until completely eliminating the fiction of the fiction itself.

Beautiful until it hurts.

The protagonists (they all are) say that it was time for a film to tell what happens in the countryside;

what it costs to pick the fruit and bring it to the table.

The one who gives life to the adolescent Mariona (a key figure around whom everything is organized) says that they went

.

Actually, the actors who are not each come from a town and a family.

But in '

' they are all the same clan, the same look.

And, little by little, the family spreads until it reaches the stalls, until everyone is involved.

From being nothing to being a lot.

The cast includes the names of

But he falls short.

Actually, there are many more.

Anyone can be another actor in Carla Simón's film.

He hopes that we are not all Carla Simón herself.

At the time

One of the accidental and adolescent filmmakers of the 'Cinema in progress' mentioned in the first paragraph once told a journalist on account of one of his exercises with the camera that a window is the beginning of heaven.

And that, in effect, is '

', the beginning of many heavens.

---

Good note

.

For the rest, we must thank the Spanish Film Academy for the brilliant idea of ​​programming the Goya in the middle of the Berlinale.

Thanks to this, the two Spanish films (the one by Isaki Lacuesta and this one) went from a very visible screening on the weekend, where they had originally been assigned, to being relegated to the last two days due to avoiding coincidences with the numbers gala musicals.

Without a doubt,

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

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