Rural Fictions
Rural Fictions
Farming vs the earth in contemporary film.
MARCH 27, 2025
Two-thirds of the way through Rachel Kushner’s novel Creation Lake, the narrator, spy-for-hire Sadie Smith, relays a conversation between Pascal Balmy, the leader of the radical commune in France she is infiltrating, and two younger environmental activists. Pascal’s comrades are questioning his sympathetic stance toward local farmers. These farmers are not just xenophobic, they say, but also oppose everything the commune stands for, including much-needed environmental reforms. To this, Pascal replies:
A farmer wants to be able to tend his land … just as his father and grandfather and his great-grandfather had done before him. He wants to impart what he’s learned to his own children, so that they can inherit the land and preserve it, instead of abandon that world and move away.
Creation Lake, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, takes as its starting point the recent construction of “megabasins,” huge water reservoirs that have become a flashpoint in French politics. These giant pools, which are supposed to help big farms deal with increasingly frequent droughts, require pumping groundwater out of aquifers. Once in the megabasins, however, the water is subject to evaporation and spoilage. Their construction has provoked ferocious opposition from locals and smaller actors, as well as from environmental activists, who say agribusiness is monopolizing and likely depleting a vital public resource.
The conflict between farmers and the green transition is a new phenomenon. Yet the way that recent works of fiction portray this conflict often feels remarkably familiar, playing into an old idea of the countryside as a remnant bound to be destroyed by the march of progress.
In Creation Lake, rural politics is mostly a backdrop to the postmodern espionage plot and Sadie’s increasing fascination with the octogenarian ideologue of the commune. Even so, the novel belongs to a growing body of fiction and film that deals with farmers’ threatened way of life and their increasing unrest as a result of policies meant to curb climate change or temper its effects.
Clashes between farmers and the EU’s environmental agenda are taking place throughout Europe. Farmers are driving their tractors through capital cities in protest, and Green parties suffered significant losses in last summer’s European elections. The conflict feels especially bitter and intractable in countries such as France, Spain, and my country, Italy — places where farmers’ general turn to the right and opposition to environmental reforms meets a long history of smallholding and an attachment to an outdated, romantic idea of the peasantry.
The conflict between farmers and the green transition is a new phenomenon. Yet the way that recent works of fiction portray this conflict often feels remarkably familiar, playing into an old idea of the countryside as a remnant bound to be destroyed by the march of progress. The films As Bestas (“The Beasts”) by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Alcarrás by Carla Simón, both released in 2022, dramatize the impact of green energy on the European rural milieu. Both films portray farming as fundamentally a thing of the past, and the conflict between agriculture and climate as one between smallholding farmers and renewables.
In doing so, they obfuscate the reality of contemporary farming in Europe — namely, that agriculture, far from being a backward sector in need of further modernization, is an industry that’s ruthless and exploitative in ways peculiarly modern. A 2020 report showed that, while smallholdings account for two-thirds of the total number of farms in Europe, almost 70 percent of the continent’s agricultural land is used by large farms of 50 hectares (approximately 120 acres) or more. These are industrial operations dependent on fossil fuels not just as diesel for tractors, but also for large quantities of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. They practice monoculture and intensive husbandry in order to maximize production and benefit from economies of scale to the detriment of long-term soil health and biodiversity. Their treatment of workers and animals is often abysmal.
Munir Hachemi’s 2019 novel Cosas Vivas (“Living Things”), published in an English translation by Julia Sanches last year, takes a different view of 21st-century rural life. Chilling and surreal, this work of autofiction rejects the image of the countryside as a tragic holdout against modernity. Instead, it presents contemporary farming as what it mostly is: a system hellbent on grinding down workers, animals and the environment itself in a headlong pursuit of profit.
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In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams’s classic study of the countryside in English literature, Williams notes that the rural has always been defined in opposition to the urban, through a set of recurring “symbols” and “archetypes.” In particular, he argues, the country has always been portrayed as a separate place — a hopeless backwater to escape, or a pastoral idyll to which to retreat. In both cases, the countryside is a discrete locale somehow spared the workings of modernity and capitalism, which are usually identified with the city.
Loosely based on a true story, As Bestas is a dark thriller set in a remote part of rural Galicia, the most northwestern region of the Iberian Peninsula. In a forsaken village, the economic opportunities presented by the arrival of wind farms trigger a tragic feud between embittered locals and a couple of idealistic French city-dwellers who have recently moved to the area. Many scenes in the film are spoken in the local language and the village, as well as the mountainous, rugged landscape that surrounds it, are portrayed as subsisting at the edge between wilderness and civilization.
As Bestas opens shortly after a vote has been held in which a narrow majority of small-holding families in the village — five against four — decided against selling their land to Norwegian investors who want to turn the area into a sprawling wind farm. The French couple, Antoine and Olga, are among those who voted against. They plan to practice regenerative agriculture on the land that they have just bought. In doing so, they imagine, they will save the area from decline by making it palatable to other eco-friendly folks who would also like to take up agroecological farming and a slower, more ethical lifestyle.
The overweening, violent farmer Xan Xanta and his mentally disabled younger brother Loren wanted to sell their land. They saw the Norwegian investors as their ticket out of a mean existence and consequently are furious with Antoine and Olga, whom they view as having had the casting vote that prevented any of the villagers from selling.
For Xan and Loren, wind power is at once deliverance from rural life and late compensation for centuries living at the bottom of the food chain. Antoine, with his foreign airs and harebrained fantasies of rural regeneration and organic farming, has got in the way of these reparations.
The film portrays the disagreement between neighbors not as an interpersonal squabble, but as a confrontation of two lifestyles and worldviews between which no compromise is possible. In the first scene, two unidentified men force a foal into submission by almost strangling it — a reference to the Galician ritual of rapa das bestas, in which locals tame wild horses with their bare hands. This sets the village up as a violent frontier milieu. Xan and Loren are similarly presented as a pair of saloon villains right out of an old-school western: the bully and his blubbering idiot sidekick.
As the film progresses, the brothers become increasingly vengeful, driven by ancient resentments and a deep-seated inferiority complex. The escalating tension between the brothers and the French couple reaches its peak in a verbal stand-off at the local taberna.
In one long take, Xan explains to Antoine that he finds the other man’s claim to the land (and his right to vote on whether to sell it) spurious. “You have been playing at farming for two years,” he says, “I have been here 52 years. Him [Loren], 45. My mother, 73.” In a rare moment of vulnerability, Xan then gives voice to the deep well of shame and self-hate that bubbles beneath his and his brother’s brutish veneer. “Not even whores want to sleep with us,” he tells Antoine, on account of their farmyard stench; finding a wife and having a family is an impossible dream. They would be better off taking the money offered by the wind speculators and leaving for the nearby city of Ourense, where the brothers could make a living driving a cab.
For Xan and Loren, wind power is at once deliverance from rural life and late compensation for centuries living at the bottom of the food chain. Antoine, with his foreign airs and harebrained fantasies of rural regeneration and organic farming, has got in the way of these reparations. The men briefly seem to reach an understanding and then it all falls apart. By the end of the scene, it has become clear to the viewer that the brothers will not get what they want, and there will be no peaceful reconciliation between them and their city-bred neighbors.
A couple of scenes later, Antoine is ambushed in the woods by the brothers and strangled to death, in a way that recalls the forced submission of the foal in the film’s opening sequence. The rest of As Bestas sees Olga trying to find evidence that Antoine was murdered, and in the end Xan and Loren are brought to justice. However, this resolution does nothing to assuage the sense of futility and waste. Olga and Antoine’s grand schemes of rural regeneration have proved to be a lefty pipe dream. By the end of the film, Olga is just one more farmer stoically toiling the land in the way that her brutish neighbors have for centuries.
The Catalan-language film Alcarrás, which won the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlinale, likewise portrays farmers as anachronistic. But while As Bestas emphasizes the violence of the countryside, Carla Simón’s film is a melancholy-tinged portrait of all the things that make traditional rural life worth preserving, even as it will inevitably be lost. A neorealist ensemble piece starring non-professional actors, it feels like an ethnographic record of a lifestyle that is almost extinct, but of which most people in Spain and Italy retain a fond memory.
Taking place over the course of one summer, the film follows the Solé family, a close-knit clan that cultivates peaches on their smallholding in rural Alcarrás. Their entire world collapses when Pinyols, the legal owner of the land, disregards the verbal agreement made by his grandfather that the land should belong to the Solés. Eager to bag the EU subsidies and tax breaks that come with pursuing green policies, Pinyols decides to turn the whole area into a homogenous stretch of solar panels by the end of the season.
Such scenes have a pastoral quality about them, seeming to exist outside of time — and yet the viewer knows that the reality is precisely the opposite. The family’s peach-picking days are numbered; the trees will soon be replaced by solar panels.
Alcarrás doesn’t overly romanticize the Solés. Much of the strife and division that befalls the family is caused by the bottled-up anger of the patriarch, Quimet. Instead of facing the imminent loss of the land, his main source of identity and purpose, he continues to work impossible hours, worsening his debilitating back pain. He falls out with his brother-in-law when the latter takes a job working on the solar panels, and with Pinyols when the landlord suggests that he might get a job there as well. The film doesn’t conceal the role that informal migrant labor plays in European agriculture and the toll that its informality takes on the migrants. Quimet dismisses without hesitation his African laborers when he understands this will be his last harvest and he had better maximize his returns.
Still, the story is bathed in elegiac light. In The Country and the City, Williams writes that the idea of the country as a tranquil idyll is often linked with the “the feel of childhood.” From the very opening sequence, in which children’s play is disrupted by excavators, the film portrays the Solé household as an arcadia subsisting on borrowed time. Family relationships in the film are characterized by reciprocal aid and support. Simón’s film shows the back-breaking side of peach-picking, but it also captures the joy and fulfillment that communal work and communal living can bring. One day, the whole family pitches in to help pick peaches. Suddenly, another afternoon sweating in the sun becomes a family feast, the children’s cheeks smattered with peach juice, the grandmother Pepita recounting stories of the good old days.
Such scenes have a pastoral quality about them, seeming to exist outside of time — and yet the viewer knows that the reality is precisely the opposite. The family’s peach-picking days are numbered; the trees will soon be replaced by solar panels.
As Bestas and Alcarrás offer radically different representations of the European countryside. Yet in portraying smallholders as remnants of a time before modernity, they share a set of premises that are common in conversations about the relationship between farming and the environment. The rural exists outside the currents of the globalized economy; farmers are a relic whose disappearance is inevitable in the face of modernization and the transition to a greener future.
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Cosas Vivas takes a different approach. Hachemi’s novel is an autofictional account of Spanish city boys with literary pretensions who accidentally become cogs in the industrial farming machine. At first, Cosas Vivas seems an unlikely candidate to convey the reality of contemporary farming. The metafictional form of the book and its digressions on the nature of novel writing itself are deliberately off-putting and call into question the narrative’s truthfulness. Yet, this approach — as well as the gonzo hooliganism and cluelessness of the protagonists — creates an atmosphere of hallucination and paranoia that better conveys the horror and absurdity of the characters’ experience: It sounds dystopian, but it’s simply the reality of industrial farming today.
When the narrator, Munir, and his friends arrive in Aire-sur-L’Adour, southwestern France, in July, they imagine an experience not unlike what is depicted in Alcarrás, picking grapes while getting a good tan. They soon discover, however, that there are no grapes to be picked as the harvest won’t take place until fall. Instead, they are sent to a chicken farm where their job is to grab live chickens by the handful and throw them into a wheeled cage, before they are taken to be killed. There, the friends are plunged into a hell that defies description in its mix of aseptic rationality and normalized violence.
Munir may be vaccinating chickens rather than grabbing them on their way to slaughter, but the work is just as thankless and cruel.
The height of horror and alienation occurs when the narrator is sent to a vaccination center for chickens, “a massive, modular, bleach-white industrial unit in the middle of a scorched wheat field.” Earlier in the book, he and his friends were surprised to find out that the supermarkets in Aire-sur-L’Adour are branches of the same chains as the ones in Spain. At the chicken vaccination center, the image of the supermarket returns, this time describing the inside of the facilities:
Picture a supermarket … except that all the aisles — which stretch so far back you can’t see the end of them — have been cleaned out and filled with tiny cages you’d never in your life have thought could hold twenty chickens.
In this bizarro supermarket where everything is “brilliantly white,” the life cycle of chickens is “regulated by neon lights” and the only way to tell time is by a whistle that every 20 minutes signals “the dumping of large quantities of corn into gutter-like troughs where the chickens go to feed.” Here, Munir may be vaccinating chickens rather than grabbing them on their way to slaughter, but the work is just as thankless and cruel.
After this close encounter with intensive factory farming, the narrator vows to go vegan. He manages to find another gig at a multinational corporation that harvests a variety of crops including corn and mushrooms. The pay is better, but the work feels even more absurd, if less gruesome: At one point, Munir is tasked with infecting corn with spores that resemble multicolored candies. Later, he is told, these candies will sprout into mushrooms.
All the while, seasonal workers in the area are dying off mysteriously in road accidents. The deaths happen with such frequency that Munir and his friends start to imagine a dark conspiracy. The truth is both more pedestrian and more horrifying. These workers often supplement their income by running errands and are paid per mile driven. As a result, they often drive two or three times above the speed limit — often while drunk or in a state of exhaustion after a day’s shift. Given these circumstances, crashes are inevitable.
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By the end of Cosas Vivas, looking back on his time in the French countryside, Munir concludes that “there are no morals to real-life stories … true horror does not know vitriol, only monotony and routine.” Though the novel is based on the author’s experience, it isn’t strictly a work of realism. Nevertheless, it poignantly conveys the repressed reality of our food system: its casual violence and exploitation, and its almost dystopian modernity.
At no point does Hachemi claim to be any sort of authority on the subject of farming. On the contrary, the narrative voice mixes naivete and disbelief. Even so, by simply relaying Munir’s traumatic stint as an agricultural laborer, the novel makes clear how the old rural tropes fail to describe the reality of the European countryside. If we want to find solutions to the complex problems of farming today, Cosas Vivas shows, we should start by reexamining the stories we tell ourselves.
