Filmmaker to Tell Story of Struggling Olive Farmers in Spain in 90s

A British film­maker is seek­ing fund­ing to film a drama about a fam­ily of strug­gling olive farm­ers in Spain at the turn of the mil­len­nium.

“A Story of the Campo” tells the tale of a 19-year-old Paco, who faces pres­sure to take over the fam­ily olive farm as a real-estate boom on the coast lures work­ers away from the inte­rior with the promise of con­struc­tion jobs.

This is the kind of sto­ries I want to tell, to show this real-life view of what olive farm­ing fam­i­lies were going through at the time.- Matthew Jeffrey

It’s a time and place that Matthew Jeffrey knows well. He and his par­ents left England and moved to the south of Spain dur­ing the con­struc­tion boom. Jeffrey was 8‑years old.

“I grew up on the Spanish coast. But I had a friend that lived in an inland town called Cartama and his house was right by an olive farm. I always remem­ber being blown away by the vast amount of olive trees, and I always used to enjoy watch­ing the work­ers on the farms,” Jeffrey said in an inter­view with Olive Oil Times.

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​“The film is not based on any­one that I knew, but is based on the world that was around me at that time. I was too young to under­stand the bank­ing cri­sis and the boom of con­struc­tion in the early 90s, but this topic and time has always inter­ested me.”

In the late 90s and early 00s, a series of events trig­gered a mas­sive surge in con­struc­tion. First, inter­est rates plum­meted from 14 per­cent to 4 per­cent as the nation adopted the Euro in 2002. Then Spain’s gov­ern­ment opened a tremen­dous amount of land on the coasts to devel­op­ment. Thousands of peo­ple from Spain’s inte­rior and else­where in the E.U. flocked to the con­struc­tion sites for work.

When the bub­ble burst, roughly 1 mil­lion prop­er­ties were left unsold. Unemployment among Spain’s 18- to 25-year-olds soared to 50 per­cent.

Jeffrey is crowd­sourc­ing funds for the film on the Indiegogo plat­form, which con­nects artists and cre­ative entre­pre­neurs with small investors. At the time of the inter­view, he was just short of halfway to a goal of £3,000 ($3,650)

And as Jeffrey works to gen­er­ate cash for the project, things have already pro­gressed. A pro­duc­tion com­pany has been cho­sen, actors have been cast, and a loca­tion selected.

“We are film­ing at an olive farm in a town called Alhora, close to Malaga,” he said. ​“It really is a beau­ti­ful place, Stunning sun­rises, and sun­sets with huge col­or­ful skies and vast moun­tains.”

In addi­tion, Jeffrey and his team have made an unusual deci­sion about the lan­guage in the film.

“The film takes place in Andalusia and the dialect will be spo­ken in the tra­di­tional Andalucian accent, which is not very com­mon in Spanish cin­ema at all,” Jeffrey said.

Jeffrey, 24, stud­ied Media, Film and Production at Staffordshire University. He’s been mak­ing films pro­fes­sion­ally for four years.

“Being a British film­maker who grew up in Spain I feel as though a big part of my past is over there and that’s is why I am now mak­ing this film,” he said. ​“I have always been fas­ci­nated with the peo­ple liv­ing in the Campo. This is the kind of sto­ries I want to tell, to show this real-life view of what olive farm­ing fam­i­lies were going through at the time.”

To learn more or to sup­port the film, visit Jeffrey’s cam­paign page.

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• IndieGoGo


• The Guardian