Ralda+Friends as a solution to the “The Olive Tree’s” dilemma

Last June, Spanish Film Director Iciar Bollain released the movie “The Olive Tree” (“El Olivo”). Critics have celebrated the film for its excellent actors’ works and the emotional script. Fot this reason Ralda+Friends truly encourages all our friends to go watch the movie to the cinema.

However we want to raise a relevant topic that Ms. Bollain used to build her analogy on the recent financial and economic crisis and the story of this Olive Tree. It is the selling of thousands of olive trees from our fields, some of which are millenaries, to wealthy people and corporations from Northern Europe.

There is nothing wrong in selling olive trees and fields to people and farmers who are willing to develop the production, but the problem appears when the trees are leaving their fields to travel thousands of kilometres away because we are creating not only a tremendous hole left by the tree that is gone but also a loss of our world heritage.

That is, precisely, the motto of “The Olive Tree”. In a recent article of Spanish newspaper El Pais (http://bit.ly/1SZ55qD), journalist Gregorio Belinchon explained accurately the case by quoting Ms. Bollain words: “In France it is forbidden to uproot olive trees, it is not to buy them, the same as in China, Middle East and Northern Europe… It is a metaphor of an era in Spain where the landscape was sacked, moved by the short-term business interest of real state which ended in nowhere (…). The olive tree is also used to criticise the Spanish mentality. If a Spanish kid is asked about millenaries trees he will automatically answer ‘the Sequoya’, but he will never mention the olive tree…”.

The problem with selling a millenary olive tree means the loss of a culture, expertise, gastronomy, common history and identity. And it is also the problem of an economy that is suffering especially in the rural areas. That’s why Ralda+Friends was born: in order to fight against this situation and save our olive trees.

Once again we want to thank all of our friends and adopters for their support and cooperation and we invite everybody to watch this movie when it arrives to your big screens in your cities.