Fresh from his I, Daniel Blake triumph with Ken Loach, screenwriter Paul Laverty brings a new work to the UK: a heartfelt, low-key, sweet-natured movie he scripted for his partner, the Spanish director Icíar Bollaín.
It has a touch of Ealing, almost, but with an undertow of sadness and social comment. Bollaín shapes the performances well. Anna Castillo is Anna, a young woman very close to her grandfather (Manuel Cucala). The old man has retreated into depression and dementia since his grownup children cynically uprooted and sold off his beloved 2,000-year-old olive tree, against his will, to pay for a now bankrupt tourist-restaurant business.
Anna discovers that the buyer of the tree is a Düsseldorf energy company, which has placed it in its glitzy lobby and uses it as a letterhead symbol of its entirely spurious green credentials. So Anna bamboozles some friends and family into going with her in a borrowed flatbed truck on a crazily quixotic mission to rescue the tree and bring it back home, and her wild plan energises German environmental campaigners. The film has gentleness and charm.
