Anna Castillo is Alma, 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 to its rightful spot.
Symbolic of what has happened in Spain over the last 15 years The Olive Tree is an earthy, quietly stirring Spanish fable that finds familial, regional, economic and environmental grievances inseparably tangled in its branches. It is however the human relationships that are most poignant here.
Spanish