Max and Amy are a young South Korean couple who have settled in New York for 10 years. When they studied the programming of the New York Film Festival they read about ‘Alcarras‘. They hadn’t seen ‘Estiu 1993’, the first film by Carla Simon, but the Catalan’s second feature film had won the Golden Bear in Berlin. It was the factor that led them to decide to approach Lincoln Center this Thursday. And they did not regret it.
“Es Absolutely beautiful”, said Amy after the projection. “I feel like I know what it’s like to be there.” “It’s a movie that everyone can enjoy and experience”, Max added. “Family, the end of a lifestyle… They are common things for everyone, is something universal”.
The magic of ‘Alcarràs’, the irrepressible empathy for the Solé family, the absolute admiration for the natural actors that give them life, the universality of the history of that corner of Catalonia and the rural world on which Simón has turned his delicate gaze, the director’s gift for working with children… Everything unfolded again in the Walter Reade cinema. And the film surpassed its first encounter with an American audience with honors, translated into a full auditorium, applause after screening and complimentary comments of the attendees after seeing it and listening to Simón in the colloquium that he had with Eugene Hernández, the director of the festival.
Oscar race
There could be no better start to the journey than the film, chosen three weeks ago to represent Spain at the Oscars, has ahead of it to try to overcome the first screen of the Hollywood Academy and make a hole between the 15 pre-finalists to be announced on December 15. And Simón herself left “very happy” with the first screening in New York.
Although she had had to be absent from that pass to feed her four-month-old son, she had seen and also learned from the producers that, on this side of the Atlantic, people also laugh and get excited where all the audiences laugh and They get excited. she had lived again “very nice” momentswith people coming up to tell him that they liked it, like the boy of Japanese origin who explained to him that his film made him feel nostalgia and it has transported him to things of his family. “He’s always nice when people travel through the film and somehow manage to connect with something of their own through the film,” said Simón. “Although there are no people who come from towns like there, even if it is not the same geography, everyone resonates for something”.
There is now another screening at the festival this Friday in a larger room, also with a discussion and another showing next week. It remains, also, to wait for the first critics. And it remains, above all, long and intense campaign ahead to find that gap in the Oscars, a process that the producers María Zamora, from Elástica Films, and Tono Folguera, from Vilaüt Films, already talked about in September with EL PERIÓDICO and that this Thursday Simón also detailed in a meeting with three journalists a few hours before the premiere.
“Different Magnitude”
The director only had good words for the distributor with which she had already gone through this process with her first film, that ‘Estiu 1993’ that at the 2018 Oscars failed to overcome the first screening of the Hollywood Academy. But she also explained that everything this time is being “different”.
THE BAD, a prestigious firm, has acquired the rights for the US (and for other territories such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Latin America and part of Asia). has been signed to Ryan Werner, a senior executive of the consultancy and public relations company Kineticthe man who last year took the reins in Hollywood of ‘Drive my car‘, the title that won the statuette to which ‘Alcarràs’ aspires but also achieved nominations for film, screenplay and direction). “The magnitude is different”, said Simón, “the scale is bigger. They are people who push films differently, neither better nor worse, but different”.
Already the start of that campaign, at an event like the New York Film Festival, “places the film on the map with something of very strong quality.” It is next to “a very interesting harvest of the whole year” and has made him feel “super honored” to be next to other great works of the year and with directors that he admires like Claire Denis (“for me he is almost God and is a reference in how he portrays his characters, how he treats them with a lot of love, with a lot of sensuality, with a lot of affection, something that I feel I learned from his cinema”).
But there is also more intensity on the agenda for the coming months. “It is a bit unfriendly, it is so; campaigning is a complex thing and we we make movies, not promotion. Forks difficult but at the same time it is so exciting that you take it with enthusiasm and it is also an opportunity to learn how things work here”, he said.
Simon already knows, for example, that he will have to return to New York, a city he visited for the first time for a week or ten days when he spent a year at the University of Santa Barbara, in California, on an exchange, and to which he then did not I thought to return as it has. “continues me surprising that with the cinema and the things that I wanted to explain I have been able to get so far“, He said.
It has also done so in catalan, something that is no longer a barrier for the American public and academics. “Little by little they are opening more and it was a necessary thing,” she reflected. “In the context of festivals, where the people who come are cinephiles, they are already open to seeing films in other languages and with subtitles. In any case, it’s nice that this is happening and what often happens is that there are people who discover that Catalan exists thanks to the film. This happened with ‘Estiu 1993’ and with ‘Alcarràs’ it’s also happening and for me it’s an honor to see that the culture we create helps people discover the Catalan language”.
The mystery of the rivals
What still seems early to elucidate is what real chances ‘Alcarràs’ has at the Oscars, or which films may represent the greatest competition. That is what Werner, from Cinetic, said at least when asked when he arrived at the pass in New York. And that is what Simón also explained that the American distributors have told him about him. “It’s early because the countries have just selected all the films, they are being released now, there are no critical reactions yet… Those at MUBI say it’s a very curious year why the most obvious films have not been chosen for each country and there are no very big names as happens in other years. puts them a little nervous but at the same time it’s like funny why anything can happen”.
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Whatever happens in that fight for the statuette, Simón looks radiant. He assured that for her “it is already a victory to have come this far”, and that he “never planned to go so far”. “Me I don’t do movies to win an OscarI make movies because I have the need to explain my things and it is the medium that I like the most”, he also said. and she was talking about go “very cautiously. I try not to imagine what would happen if we arrived, but, for now, let’s go step by step, little by little, following everything we need to be able to get as far as we can. Then there are the expectations of others, which I cannot control, and something like this generates many. But there is still a long way to go. You have to be careful,” she insisted.
His triumph, furthermore, goes beyond what Hollywood decides, whether he walks the red carpet, or goes on stage at the Dolby Theater. Max and Amy, the New York South Korean viewers, were not only amazed by ‘Alcarràs’. After seeing Simón’s work and listening to it, they knew they were going to see something else: ‘Estiu 1993’.