Passion Of Augustine / Olive Tree DVD

 

 

Never Lose Touch With Your Roots.

PASSION: Simone Beaulieu, better known as Mother Augustine, runs a convent school for girls in the Canadian province of Quebec in the 1960s. She has turned the little convent into a musical treasure where the students have won every prestigious music competition in the region. When her talented but rebellious niece joins the convent, and when the government threatens to shut down the school in favour of public education, her world is suddenly turned upside down. She and her fellow nuns are forced to confront the waves of modernity, and Mother Augustine herself must search her soul for a new calling. Can she accept her past in order to move forward? Or will she perish with tradition?
OLIVE TREE: Alma is 20 year-old and she survives working on a chicken farm in the town of Canet (region of Castelln). Like people from her generation, she is inheritor of a country in crisis and a region ruined; a place that has speculated and built until the last spot of its landscape. Alma belongs to a family that is also in ruins, with a father, Luis, that during a time of prosperity, sold the most sacred thing for her: a millenary olive tree, planted during the roman times, in the family olive grove. Luis, defeated by the crisis, has had to come back to the family house, to live with his father, Alma's grandfather, who decided to stop talking many years ago, when the olive tree was pull out of his land. And now, even to complicate more things, the patriarch has stop eating too. Alma is obsessed with the idea that the only thing that could "bring back" her grandfather is the millenarian olive tree that the family sold against his will. And even though at the beginning her friends try to persuade her about going on this irrational adventure, Alma will convince, not only her uncle Alcachofa (45), a comic victim of the crisis, and her workmate Rafa (27), but also her friends Wiki and Adele and part of the small community of Canet. They'll all embrace an impossible mission, even absurd: getting back the olive tree replanted somewhere in Europe, and bring it back to Canet, to the place where it should have never left. "Sometimes you have to start things...", Alma says, "even though you don't know how will they finish". Powerful and fragile, fierce and delicate, self destructive and, at the same time, willing to give everything she has for her grandfather, the person she loves the most. Alma is a force of nature; a young woman who is able to change the course of things... or at least, to try it. Therefore, without telling the truth, without a plan, and with almost no money, Alma makes not only that her friend Rafa "borrows" a half million euro truck, but also that he, and her uncle Alcachofa, drive the truck to Dusseldorf (Germany), where Alma and her friends have located the olive tree, recognizable for the shape of a dragon that it has in one of its branches. For everybody in Canet's surprise, the news regarding an old man, on a hunger strike and a niece willing to do everything in her hand to bring back the millenarian tree to its original place, runs through the social networks faster than the truck drives the roads of Europe. In the meantime, an unaware Alcachofa happily drives, talking about his anger about his fate. And Rafa, while listening to him, will also try to understand the complicated Alma and her necessity of hurting herself. Once in Dusseldorf, Alcachofa and Rafa find out that Alma lied to them, since no one is waiting to give them back the olive tree. But also, they'll find out that they are not alone in their adventure. In a tone that sometimes grazes the dark comedy, The Olive Tree is the story of an achievement and a trip that will not leave anybody intact, starting for our protagonist. The Olive Tree is a story that talks with tenderness -and sometimes with humor- about Alma. About how much she can hurt herself. And also about everything she can do for the person she cares the most in this world. But also talks about what happened in Spain in the past 15 years. The hurt we've been granted with. The hurt we have done to ourselves. And what can we do to start overcoming of that wound.