the farewell to the orchard of a family of Catalan farmers

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED

Catalonia, summer 2021. The Solé family cultivates peach trees on the basis of an oral oath established during the Spanish Civil War. But, since the death of his father, the owner plans to raze the trees and build a photovoltaic farm. Devastating shock for the tribe of farmers who are struggling to compete with industrial agriculture. At the start of the school year, the orchard taken for granted will look like an oil spill of silicon. Against nature, the ecological industry is gaining ground. Faced with this premature end, the Solé have nothing else to do but finish the last harvest.

The great strength of Our suns is due to its ability to escape the theoretical and militant partitions of the ecological subject. If the film presents itself a priori as such, it favors the portrait of the family at the height of a man. It is teeming with scenes of work, chatter, games and siestas, which highlight the attachment of the Solé clan to the farm, from which we hardly ever leave. It is with astonishing fluidity that Carla Simon anchors herself to the daily life of each of the members, without any hierarchy, going through small individual storms within the community and skillfully composing a palette of secondary intrigues.

In her second feature film, awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2022, the 36-year-old Spanish screenwriter and director returns to the rural village where she grew up, Alcarras (which gives the film its original title ). The place also served as the setting for his beautiful first autobiographical feature film, Summer 1993 (2017), which followed a first bereavement, that of a 6-year-old girl, who had gone to live in the countryside with her uncle and aunt, after the death of her parents.

Stationary expulsion

Our suns once again benefits from the emotional proximity of its author to this verdant landscape, which deposits in the viewer’s retina the beat of an open-air childhood. Mourning refusal in the Garden of Eden. The eye of the camera is gorged with nature, refusing to believe in this organized death. The sensory bias follows the curve of the leaves, slips into the darkness of the trees and sticks to the sweet juice of the fruits. Our suns is experienced both as the exaltation of the present and the repression of the pain lurking in everyone.

This last summer has all the appearance of an ordinary harvest. Men patrol the night with shotguns and flashlights, watchful for rabbits in the orchards, children zigzag between the trees, teenagers make themselves beautiful and bored, women prepare large tables for more than fifteen people. … In the interstices, however, there is the painful learning to live without one’s land, with all that that implies in terms of disputes and annoyances. This violence is reflected in everyone’s movements, in no longer wanting to cross paths, in accelerating the pace, in moving forward with their heads down. We no longer walk on this earth as before. The precarious balance of the natural ecosystem is also domestic.

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