The Cherry Tree

Ángel lebt bei seiner Schwester und seiner Großmutter und sein Vater ist weg. Seine Mutter tourt mit dem Zirkus und Ángel muss oft an den nahenden Tod seiner Großmutter denken, von der er sich vorstellt, dass sie in einem Himmel voller Kirschbäume weiterleben wird. Kirschbäume zeichnet Ángel am liebsten. Dolors, Ángels ältere Schwester, ist verzweifelt bemüht, von Männern ausgeführt zu werden - im Dorf ist kaum einer mehr übrig, mit dem sie noch keine Liebelei gehabt hätte. Dann aber lernt sie den neuen Doktor des Dorfes kennen. (Mark Deming)


Set in a remote Catalan village, The Cherry Tree focuses on Ángel, a young boy living with his grandmother and sister; his mother is off working in a circus, his father is long gone. Ángel fears that his grandmother will soon be going as well, to a better place far away that he imagines full of the cherry trees he takes such delight in drawing. His sister also thinks of leaving, and has tried to do so by casting her lot with a number of men who eventually disappointed her. But then a new doctor moves into the village. Recha presents these lives and those of their fellow villagers through the eyes of Ángel, who will take from all the experiences he sees a sense of what he can expect from life.

Told with a fairy-tale-like misting partly via the child Ángel's voice-over and bringing in Europe's fox-and-grandmother folk tales, the film is a quick-switching mosaic of the intersecting lives of the characters against the backdrop of inhospitable foggy mountains, the constantly moving waters of streams and ponds, and the Dionysian Elysian cycles of the growth, death and rebirth of nature as well as man.