If you wanted to explain in pictures where this film is set, you would first have to show the fruit department in a German supermarket, where the coveted Spanish flat peaches are, and then the truck that brought the peaches here on the Autobahn.

Then you would have to trace the path of fruit transport back to the Catalan province of Lleida on the southern slope of the Pyrenees, to the district of Segrià, which takes its name from a tributary of the Ebro, and to the town of Alcarràs, which according to Wikipedia in 2019 had almost ten thousand inhabitants and had a fourteenth-century church.

Eventually one would come from there to a peach orchard in a nearby valley between treeless hills.

This is where “Alcarràs” takes place.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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But of course the way to get there is not shown in the film.

The plantation is just there, as is the farmhouse with the small pool that sits in the middle, and its residents tending the peach trees and harvesting their fruit.

The film does not explain what it shows, it relies on the evidence of its images and our will to read them.

In the beginning you see four children sitting in a wrecked car on one of the bare hills and playing that they could fly.

Suddenly you hear engine noise, an excavator rolls up, the children flee, and the excavator lifts the car up like a toy and clears it away.

You don't have to be a symbol interpreter to understand that this beginning is an end, an irreversible break.

Only the children don't know, they are waiting for the excavator to move away so they can continue playing.

A lot of the scenes in this film are like that: something happens, but the people it affects don't realize what it means.

The energy of the story arises from this tension between reality and its perception.

The peach grove near Alcarràs has been managed by the Solé family for three generations.

The children playing belong to Quimet, the head of the family, and his wife Dolors, to his sister Nati and her husband Cisco, and to his second sister Gloria, who has come from the city of Lleida for the harvest season.

In one of the first scenes, one is casually told that the Solés have no legal title to their land, and it gradually becomes clear what follows.

During the Spanish Civil War, the ancestors of the Solés hid the family of the large landowner Pinyol in their basement, presumably from the communists.

As a thank you, old Pinyol gave them the plantation.

But his grandson no longer feels bound by the verbal agreement from back then, he wants to set up a solar park in the country.

The excavator from the beginning is the vanguard of the machines that are supposed to level the terrain.

Farming, says young Pinyol, is no longer worthwhile.

But the peach harvest is still in progress.

The trees are in sap.

Quimet and his son Roger hunt the rabbits, which are eating their branches, with small-bore rifles.

Irrigation from the Segre River works, the cultural landscape and its inhabitants are in balance.

The first to understand that this is all going to end is Rogelio, the children's grandfather.

After the Civil War he was a boy himself.

Now he roams restlessly through the nocturnal plantation, puts his hand on the tree trunks as if he wanted to say goodbye to them.

With his granddaughter Iris, he picks particularly beautiful peaches and brings them to Pinyol in town to change his mind.

But that can be denied.

Later, Rogelio drives to Alcarràs and sits down at his regulars' table in the village pub to negotiate with the other old fruit growers about acquiring a new piece of land for his family.

But they are all already in business with large companies who are planning to buy up the cultivation area north of the Ebro.