Kirpianuscus ...who has many chances to be yours. because the subject is more than familiar. the script - wise reflection about contemporary society and its clash against tradition, about a sort of love who only the grandparents and grandchildren knows it, a trip who has as purpose a form of justice who escapes to definitions. a confession - film. because, it is so easy to discover yourself as Alma. so, a tale. a simple one. but useful. for remind . an old man, his olive tree and a gesture changing everything. that is all.

Tom Dooley Alma is a teenager who benefited from the pure love that a grandparent can give to a favoured grandchild. As such she loves her grandfather, but her own father and uncle are not so sweetly disposed to their old man. He, meanwhile, has started to slip from the World. His decline goes back to when his sons sold his beloved olive tree that was two thousand years old to fund a restaurant business before the banking crisis.We get to a point where Alma realises he will die if he is not reunited with the tree and so sets out on a mission to find it and bring it home. Only problem is she hasn't got a clue or any money and no way of achieving her aims but she decides not to let the glaringly obvious stop her.Now this is a lovingly written story by the brilliant Paul Laverty ('I Daniel Blake' etc) and is acted by players who all inhabit their perspective roles with a simple believability. It can be funny and it can be painful but at its heart it is just a very touching and human story and shows how a thing can be as important to a person and another person – we can not help what we love in life. It is in Spanish with a bit of German and some English – well translated in the sub titles. If you like Ken Loach film you will want to see this - completely recommended.

Mike Todd Wasn't sure what to expect with this one, but I was immediately convinced by the solid acting performances of all the main leads in what turned out to be an interesting examination of the bonds that hold family together. Sold for the purposes of short term economic gain, a 2000 year old heirloom olive tree, the love of grandfather Ramon and granddaughter Alma, is sold to a German multinational. The resulting grief of grandfather and granddaughter on experiencing this loss results in the prior losing the will to speak and the latter suffering what can only be described as post traumatic stress. What results is an engaging drama come road trip across Europe shared Alma, her uncle and friend, to return the tree to the now ailing Ramon. A journey which is sufficiently long enough to allow this small group to get to know each other, talk about the reasons that brought the them to that point and to come to terms with past and present family decisions and relationships. Indeed, there is enough time for some additional distraction, humour and small drama which adds to an otherwise straightforward plot. What the film lacks in complexity and any satisfactory feeling of stakes is compensated for by the excellent acting of the main characters which convinces us of Alma and her personal journey to right a perceived wrong. So good is the central performance that doubts about Alma's quest solely being about her attempt to help her 'yayo' are raised, leaving the lector to wonder whether her quest is as much about her own need to find peace than she would openly admit to. The cinematography on show is not particularly inspiring, especially in the second half of the film, but occasionally panoramic views of the beautiful olive groves of Castellon burst out allowing the movie to breath a little. Otherwise, claustrophobic settings of farm houses, flats, cafes and a truck dominate the majority of the film. The unfortunate result is a rather TV rather then cinematic feel to the movie. Better is the music, which captures the moods of loss, some sprinkling of hope and ultimately helps the script capture the themes of traditional values of Spanish family, tradition and the responsibility each generation has to protect the heritage passed down to it from the prior. Overall, an above average melodrama, which leaves the viewer with more to think about than you might have thought likely coming into the cinema. Best watched in Spanish with subtitles.

Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "El olivo" or "The Olive Tree" is a Spanish full feature film from this year that runs for approximately 95 minutes and as there is a road movie component to it, there are all kinds of languages included in here. The writer is Indian-born British filmmaker Paul Laverty and not too many will know him. However, the director (female filmmaker Icíar Bollaín) as well as the cast are exclusively or almost exclusively Spanish. This is probably one of the more known films from Spain this year, even if the cast are probably only known to Spanish people. Lead actress is the young Anna Castillo and she plays a woman trying to get back her grandfather's beloved olive tree when her granddad is clearly struggling with his health and he has been missing the tree for years after the family decided it had to be cut for financial reasons (over sentimental reasons).I personally enjoyed the watch for the most part. There were parts and sequences that should have been left out, but I will come to these in a second. While I did not think Castillo was bad in the lead role, I still felt repeatedly while watching that I would have preferred the actress who plays the main character's friend, the one with the kinda short punk-style haircut, in her role instead. But you can't always get what you want. The weakest moment for the film was perhaps when they randomly through in a reference about the main character being touched inappropriately on several occasions as a child. What was that? You cannot do that without elaborating any further on it. Oh well... I generally would say that the second half of the film was better than the first because we actually found out more about the characters and there was more character development while the presentation part in the first half, also with the early phase of the road trip was just too long. I do believe they should have included the flashback scenes as at least one third of the movie and not just five minutes. I must say the fact that we saw so little from early when she was a child hurt the film's emotional impact by a lot.But away from the negative, lets focus a bit on the positive now: I thought this was a really interesting and well-done film from the moment when they arrived at Dusseldorf. The company's actions seemed realistic and I also liked the reference to the ending in terms of happiness. Happy ending, I mean. It would have been pretty unrealistic if they had actually managed to get the tree back, but the way with planting a new one it was still fairly optimistic. Life goes. Life rises. And may this new olive tree be indeed luckier than the last one. The social media campaign component of the film is fine overall I guess. I can see it become a bit of a spectacle, but maybe it all went to fast. Then again the ride to Germany was much longer than it may have seemed for us audience members. As a whole, there were a handful scenes I was not too fond of and the dialogue writing also wasn't perfect on many occasions, but I still believe it is a solid little tale, especially after minute 50, and the positive outweighs the negative. Watch it if you can.