This Wednesday comes out at the cinema Our Suns, the film by Carla Simon which won the Golden Bear, the prestigious award at the Berlin Film Festival last year. A family chronicle with the false air of a documentary, on the end of a certain agricultural model in Spain.
It’s a story that takes place in Catalonia, this autonomous community in the northeast of Spain. And more precisely in a region renowned for its orchards, with vast flat expanses, so much so that one speaks of a Catalan far west. But this history, so localized, is universal. It is that of sharecroppers who have been growing peaches for generations, but the owner of the land would like to force them to uproot the fruit trees to replace them with more profitable solar panels. Carla Simon was inspired by her mother’s family for her second feature film, chronicling the small and big moments of a family torn apart…
” It’s the end of a way of doing agriculture, this way of cultivating the land, as a family, and in a sustainable way. Because when you know that you are going to pass on land to your children, you take care of it, you pamper it. But on the other hand, these peasants do not wish this life for their children, because they know that they would live badly, if they have just a small piece of land. Now there are other modes of production in agriculture. I wanted to show that a whole world is disappearing, a way of living as a family with three generations under the same roof. I have the impression that this loss is very important but that we do not realize it. »
The 36-year-old director gives an interest to each member of the family, whether they are 4 or 94 years old… The result is all the more remarkable since the actors are all non-professionals.
“The casting was an extremely long process because there were a lot of characters to play. Fortunately, we had started before the pandemic. We visited popular festivals, markets, restaurants, agricultural cooperatives… In all, we saw 9,000 people, because originally I wanted to find members of the same family. In the end, we all chose them separately, from different villages. And to create a feeling of family, I rented a house where everyone came when they could. The rehearsals lasted four months, in particular to create a past for them, common memories, things that we don’t see on the screen, but which nourish their relationships. »
A true elegy, but also an ode to the family, Nos soleils lives up to its title, it is a luminous and moving film which seems to have no end, just like the action which continues on the screen while the credits roll at the end.