In the Old World’s most highly urbanized nation, Spain, where motorways fly by hundreds of abandoned towns, Catalonian and Basque cinema frequently set their tales in those skeletons of doomed, dying aldeas. Such a one is Marc Recha’s 1998 The Cherry Tree/L’arbre de les cireres, among twenty-five features and two compilations comprising the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s eclectic eighteen-day “Another Spanish Cinema: Film in Catalunya, 1906-2006.”

Told with a fairy misting partly via child Ángel’s (Blai Pascual) voice-over and bringing in Europe’s fox-and-grandmother folk tale, the film is a quick-switching mosaic of characters’ interacting lives against inhospitable foggy mountains, the constantly moving waters of streams and ponds, and Dionysus’ Eleusinian cycles of the growth, death and rebirth of nature as well as man.

Fatherless Ángel and older sister Dolors (Diana Palazón) take care of silent dying Grandmother (Vicenta Alemany) in a village isolated even further by a postman who peels off stamps to then discard the envelopes. Dolors’ longing notes never reach their mother, Teresa (Rosana Pastor), off working with a traveling circus and, in the daughter’s waking dreams, being loved by handsome men.

The nearest big place, the future, is Valencia, to which people go, and from which they sometimes come. Andreu (Pere Ponce) is one such arrival, a shy young doctor fleeing a soured relationship. He replaces Dr. Martí (Jordi Dauder), who is happy here but has his reasons for deciding to live with a sister in the city and leave behind Roser (Isable Rocatti), who followed him here for love and runs the boarding house where both doctors lodge; she in turn is adored by sad-sack Miquel (Berna Llobell), who realizes the hopelessness of his suit. Dolors, too, has her pure admirer, but her eye is set on Tonet (Miguel Ángel Romo), a carnival bumper-car roustabout and petty thief of olive-oil drums and road signs.

In suitably muted colors, these small lives intertwine and separate in the immemorial dance. Brother and sister learn life-lessons, and an expected death, plus an impending one, will round things out. Not under the cherry tree, but an umbrella in the incessant rain amidst good-byes, new love will take root. The title remains a puzzle, for though Grandma says it is merely asleep despite winter appearances and will make fruit come springtime, the solitary cherry tree is not as she maintains, and a chainsaw sounds an end to its twisted rock-faced agony.

Ángel delights in crayoning cherry trees, surrounded by woodland animals, and imagines the Plutarchan “better place” filled with them, but the symbolic import is never clear. Twenty-seven at the time, Recha fell into the mistake of young filmmakers, that of beginner’s insecurity that results in unsubtle overkill. The land, an obvious participant, is panned too often, and the gurgling water of the lifecycle of earth and its creatures is maddeningly recurrent. The leafs of a wall calendar for these three months, 1994-95, should have been seen once or twice, no more, and birds and village dogs might have chirped, cawed or barked less.

But the film is gently celebratory, of a kind that our own domestic output seldom manages. This is not easy nostalgia or the ‘80s “con Franco vivimos mejor” -- “we lived better under Franco” -- rumbled in Spain’s troubled young democracy. A simple way of life may pass but was not yet past even a decade ago, and man’s drama is the same but less hurriedly pictured against it. People leave, yes, but are drawn back, and it is telling that the theme music translates from the Catalonian as “Time Goes By.”

(Released by Atocha Films; not rated by MPAA.)