120 min | NR | January 6, 2023 | MUBI
A Catalan family has farmed the same peaches for generations. This year the landowner sells out to a solar company and the orchard comes down. Carla Simón films the last harvest like a wake.
The Solé family has grown peaches on the same land near Alcarràs for decades. They never owned it. A handshake deal from the war years let them stay, and now the heir who inherited the property wants solar panels where the trees stand. Carla Simón builds the film around a single summer harvest that everyone knows is the last. The real subject is not the land. It is what happens to a family when the work that defined them disappears.
Jordi Pujol Dolcet plays Quimet, the father, as a man whose body is failing under the weight of a job that is about to vanish anyway. He carries his back pain and his fury in the same stooped posture. Anna Otin plays his wife Dolors as the person who absorbs everyone else’s panic and keeps the kitchen running. Josep Abad plays the grandfather Rogelio, who made the original deal and cannot accept that a promise means nothing on paper. The children carry whole stretches of the film alone, and Ainet Jounou as the youngest, Iris, turns the orchard into a playground while the adults treat it as a grave. Simón casts non-professionals and lets them overlap and interrupt until the family feels lived in rather than written.
Simón and co-writer Arnau Vilaró refuse to stage a single confrontation that explains the stakes. The information arrives the way it does in real families, in fragments shouted across a dinner table while three other conversations run underneath. Cinematographer Daniela Cajías shoots in natural light and handheld, and the camera stays low among the trees and the children, never rising to survey the fields like a landscape painting. The frame is crowded on purpose. Bodies block other bodies, and the harvest happens at the edges while the drama plays out in the foreground. The result feels observed rather than composed.
This is a film about a way of life ending without a villain to blame for it. The solar panels are not evil. The heir is not a monster. The economics simply stopped favoring small farmers, and a family that measured its worth in fruit has to find a new measure or break apart. Simón holds the camera on the orchard long enough that the loss registers as physical. She trusts the harvest to say everything the family cannot.