The Margarita cow from the film Alcarràs identifies the Los Solé WhatsApp group. It is made up of the protagonists of the film; the director, Carla Simón; the co-writer, Albert Vilaró; Carla Bisart, from the casting team, and Clara Manyós, the coach who has helped the girls, the peasants and the teacher to be actors in the exciting film that won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale and, last week, to sweep in the Gaudí The film tells the story of a family from Alcarràs, the town where Simón’s uncles live. His last peach harvest before the eviction from the land.
The actors usually meet frequently and continue to call each other “pare” (dad), “mare” (mother), “padrí” (grandfather) or “tieta” (aunt), as they were called in rehearsals, in the house that Simón rented in l’Horta de Lleida, the green house, where everyone agrees that their bond was born. While doing a casting, they get up early to earn a living. Jordi Pujol Dolcet, (Quimet), Anna Otin (Dolors) and Albert Bosch (Roger) are candidates for best actor and best new actress at the Goya.
Xènia Roset is the pre-adolescent Mariona in the film. She combined the months of rehearsals with her first year ESO studies at the Institut Màrius Torres in Lleida. The filming began later, when the course had finished. She is currently studying third, she is 14 years old and wants to do the artistic baccalaureate to be able to prepare “a lot and enter the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona”, where she knows that it is “very difficult to enter”. She studies, skates and participates in the local theater company of her town, Torregrossa, Tour-Mix Teatre. She already has a representative to be able to dedicate herself to acting. “I’m preparing a casting for a series, I want to be an actress,” she says. Her mother, Imma Capell, says that she has always wanted to pursue acting. She learned to dance before she learned to walk.
One of the most difficult moments for her came when she returned from Berlin and opened her Instagram: she had more than a thousand follow requests, which caused her some stress. They were days in which she answered many interviews.
What cost her the most in her role is always being angry, so much so that in some rehearsal she would not stop laughing. A film family has taken from the filming and to be able to know inside how movies are made, “a very nice experience”
Carles Cabós plays Sisco, Nati’s husband. He lives in Fraga (Huesca), he is the only Aragonese in the group. Before filming he was a farmer. Not anymore: “I have a truck,” he explains while driving hands-free. “What the film tells – he explains – is more or less what was happening to me at the same time we were shooting. The filming of Alcarràs was between June and July. In these same months, we were harvesting our last peach crop because we had to close the company and find a buyer for the land.”
Cabós, who for a time was a councilor for Podemos in his town, after filming sold land, paid off the debts and began working as a truck driver for a company. He transports barley, wheat and corn to make feed.
“In the last scene everyone was crying, I know how to cry, but it didn’t come out. I thought it was strange that I didn’t cry. Thinking back, I think it’s that I had already cried a lot in real life, and that didn’t allow me to cry in fiction.”
Before Alcarràs, he participated as an extra in Jánovas (Huesca) in The path, directed by Tobias Wiemann. And then they have selected him in a casting for a movie. He has said no, he was not convinced by the conditions.
Montse Oró lives in Alcarràs. She has pig and calf farms in the towns of Llardecans and Alcanó. “I’m a cattle farmer, thanks to the Carla Simón film I learned to delegate, before I didn’t know how to do it,” says Quimet’s sister in the film, the auntie for almost everyone. She now dedicates herself more to the bureaucracy of the farm and goes less to take care of the cattle, a worker is in charge of some tasks that she did before. She did not know how to do it before, but either she delegated or she could not shoot Alcarràs: “I delegated and saw that the farms worked the same way and that my children grew well.”
The film has been a great experience for her when she got to know the world of acting, which she loved. “Not long ago I did an acting course with the actor Oriol Vila and I want to continue on that path, yes.” They have already called her to participate in a casting.
Montse Oró believes that part of the film’s success is that it has connected emotionally with many people, because there are many families that are dedicated to or have close relatives or friends who are farmers or ranchers. Also because of the bond that Simón created between the team. “I think the secret is there.”
The father of the Solé family, Quimet, is Jordi Pujol Dolcet, a candidate for Best New Actor at the Goyas. These days he is chopping the recently pruned branches of the nectarines on his farm. Then he has to sulfate. Unlike other years, he has asked that the trees be trimmed. His back problems have prevented him from doing it personally.
After filming Alcarràs, he has no projects on the big screen, although he is open to proposals that may come his way. “I don’t have any cinema right now, I continue with the task of fruit and working in the municipal patrol of Soses [su pueblo de él]”, he explains from his tractor, something smaller than the one in the film, also yours. The producer found him in Lleida, in a demonstration in which the peasants demanded fair prices, one of the messages in the film. From the shooting he has the two-day beard that he now wears. “I have never shaved with a blade,” he says. He loves that his children call him “pare” from the movies and he is enjoying seeing the world, because before he had not traveled much.
He is convinced that in many houses there are young people who want to continue with family farming and cannot because of the crisis in the sector. It is not his case. His son wants to be a mechanic.
Ainet Jounou plays Iris, one of the girls in the film. She is nine years old and, although she still has no representative, she has already been called upon for some roles: “I have done a small part of Teresa, by director Paula Ortiz, with Blanca Portillo, and I am also in a scene from the Selftape series, by Joana and Mireia Vilapuig”. She has also participated in Letter to my mother for my son, by Carla Simón.
Sitting in the dining room of her house, in Bellpuig, she is recovering from a sprain she sustained during a race. She emphatically, she assures that when she grows up she would like to be a firefighter: “I want to be one of the GRAE, some firefighters who rescue people in the mountains. Since the GRAE firefighters have one day at work and then three days off, in those three days I will do theater”.
For her, everything that has happened in Alcarràs has been good: “Recording is like playing”. Her mother, Elisenda Sánchez, says that from a very young age she wanted to do theater and that when she asked her why she wanted to go to the casting, she replied: “I like to express feelings that I don’t feel.”
Ainet will not go to the Goya awards, that day he will join the rest of the members of the WhatsApp group Los Solé who do not go to the gala to see the ceremony together.
Albert Bosch, the eldest son of the Solé (Roger), is 19 years old. He lives in Puigverd de Lleida. He combines his truck mechanic studies at the Caparrella Institute with interpretation courses and also helps out on the family farms with pear, apple, nectarine and peach trees. “I am looking for short acting courses, lasting weeks. I have life here, in my town”, he affirms. He knows well what hard work in the fields is, because for him there are many similarities between him and his character: “I am a farmer, we have land; they take them away from Roger, but here we have experienced losses due to frost, the bad winters are affecting a lot”.
His mother encouraged him to get into the role. “What I have noticed a lot at home is my mother’s happiness, she saw her with her smile and so happy and I said ‘buaf'”. Her father is less expressive, he is the one who reminds her of the tasks in the fields. It will be his mother who accompanies him to the Goya gala in which he is a candidate for best new actor. She went to the Gaudí house with his girlfriend.
He already has a representative, has made videos for some castings and hopes to do more from now on. Since he is known he has doubled the number of followers on Instagram: more than 3,000.
Behind Dolors, the Solés’ mother, is Anna Otín, a teacher at the Almacelles kindergarten. Alcarràs stands for her as a Christmas Eve continues in which gifts do not stop falling.
“The beautiful thing about Carla is that she taught us to work with each other. From February to the beginning of June, she rented a house in l’Horta de Lleida. She wanted to create that family,” she says.
He has shot the short Letter to my mother for my son with the director for Miu Miu. And she has participated in another with the director of her town, Gemma Capdevila, Mai oblidis que t’estimo, a project on Alzheimer’s, in which she really liked working. “It’s a very sweet film –she says with emotion–, which will be out soon”.
“I don’t close the door to anything, but in the kindergarten I am very happy,” says the candidate for a Goya, sitting in her class and surrounded by gowns and cribs. If she can juggle a project with her work, she will.
In order to play Dolors, she requested a leave of absence from May to July. From her experience in her role, she believes that it has allowed her to realize all the people around her, those who help her and are happy for her. “The feeling of gratitude has deepened me a lot”
In the film, everyone calls Josep Abad “padrí”. He plays Rogelio. He lives in the Partida Malgovern, in l’Horta de Lleida, although he was born in Alcarràs. “I take care of the little garden, with my wife”, he counts between celery, garlic, chard and broccoli. He always has something to do. These days he has pruned his mulberry tree and the palm trees on the path to his house. All his life he has been a fruit farmer. His daughter and his son-in-law are the ones who now run the land, where they have exchanged fruit trees for cereals, corn and barley.
He is about to turn 79 (his birthday is February 9) and, although he smiles much more than in the film, he says he recognizes himself in the role, because he has been a farmer all his life and has been very happy being an actor. : “It has been a gift, it has been an incredible thing, very big, very beautiful for me. The best, being with the whole family, with the grandchildren, sometimes we have a meal together”. The last one took place in Massalcoreig, where the house where part of the film was shot is located.
He has also participated in the short Carla Simón has made, Letter to my mother for my son, and is open to other collaborations. “You could try something easy,” she says.