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Carla Simón’s wonderful Alcarràs is set in Alcarràs, Catalonia, among a three-generation family of peach farmers whose future is uncertain. The movie is about this uncertainty. Years ago, the patriarch of the family, Rogelio (Josep Abad), made a deal with the owners of the land, the Pinyols, that it now belonged to his family. There was no written contract, only an agreement — a promise that Pinyol’s son, who now runs things, has no legal obligation to honor. Rogelio had no reason to doubt that the Pinyol family would keep its word.

Alcarràs, winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, opens on five screens in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, presented by Mubi; Quiver Distribution releases Candy Land in nine theaters; and Sony’s Tom Hanks-starring A Man Called Otto, Uar’s Women Talking and IFC Films’ Corsage move into moderate expansions as the broader specialty market barrels into Oscar nominations and a new year of reckoning with adult audiences.

The conversation about what ails the arthouse market is still treading water. Some major arthouses are Mia in a key market. With rare exceptions, audiences are failing to embrace indie titles with the gusto they’ve shown in the past. Everything Everywhere All At Once cleaned up but that’s feelgood, versus downbeat, which an emotionally exhausted moviegoing public may be avoiding. It’s not clear awards kudos will change that.

“The marketplace needs to listen to...

"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,...

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s ’The Beasts’ has 17 nominations.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beasts leads the nominees for Spain’s prestigious Goya awards, with 17, followed closely by Alberto Rodríguez’s Prison 77 on 16.

The Beasts, which had its world premiere at Cannes, centres around a French couple who cause tensions in the local village to which they move. The psychological thriller is nominated in all major categories including best film where it lines up with Prison 77, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s Lullaby, Pilar Palomero’s La Maternal and Carla Simón’s Golden Bear winner Alcarràs.

Scroll down for the full nominations

Alcarràs is...

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...

The Sole family grows peaches. Round white peaches ripen first; then the flat white peaches that supermarkets like; then yellow cling peaches. Their farmhouse is surrounded by the plantation they have tended for three generations, promised to them in perpetuity by the current owner’s great-grandparents during the Civil War. Memories are long in their corner of Catalonia. Nobody remembers a time before peaches. Harvesting determines the rhythm of their rumbustious family life. When the fruit ripens, it’s all hands on deck.

Director Carla Simon, whose radiant film Alcarrás has just won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, grew up in the region of Catalonia where this film is set: Alcarrás is the name of the nearest village. Her own uncles grow peaches; the film glows not only with sunshine and her love of this country and its ways, but real, hard knowledge of how farming as...

You can practically smell the midsummer fatigue that wafts through “Alcarràs” on the faintest and most occasional of breezes: a mixture of sweat, baked earth and ripe, plump peaches, inviting in the moment but suggestive of future spoiling. All simple seasonal pleasures are on borrowed time in Carla Simón’s lovely, bittersweet agricultural drama, and not just because winter is inevitably coming. For the large, garrulous Solé clan, who have spent every summer of their lives picking fruit from their familial orchard, this looks to be the last in that tradition, as they face imminent eviction from their patch of land in Catalonia. Yet as they squabble over their uncertain future — and plenty else besides — the sun shines and peaches droop voluptuously from endangered branches. There’s nothing for it but to complete the final harvest.

In her second feature, Catalan writer-director Carla Simón returns to the rural region that...