THE BEASTS

"The Beasts" is a tense and thought-provoking film that has garner more that 50 awards including at international film festivals (Chicago, Tokyo, San Sebastian, Goya Awards and more).

The story, based on real events, follows a French couple as they try to make a new life for themselves operating an organic farm in the Galician countryside. However, their earnest enthusiasm reeks of patronizing privilege to the handful of local families who have toiled on the land for generations. Tensions between locals and foreigners boil over in this edge-of-your-seat thriller with the threat of a wind farm project in their valley.

With the backdrop of rural Galicia, “The Beasts” is definitively Spanish, but it touches on familiar themes. The gorgeous, lush landscape and the decaying rural settlement are presented with as a place of joy from the protagonists, but the isolation can rapidly become a threat.

The newcomers are guilty of gentrifying the place for their loftier dreams of sustainability, yet that still doesn’t justify the primal instincts that drive the local brothers, Xan and Lorenzo. As with all great moral dilemmas, Sorogoyen makes it impossible to entirely side with either party without considering that each of them has been victimized by larger social ills.

In balancing the two sides’ competing motives, director / writer Rodrigo Sorogoyen and his written partner Isabel Peña has fashioned not only a taut drama but a parable that is widely applicable across many cultures at this moment. “The Beasts” continues to cement Sorogoyen’s place as one of the preeminent contemporary Spanish directors.