EXCLUSIVE: Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari has finally returned to feature filmmaking with Harvest, for which we can share a first-look clip above.
Harvest stars an interesting ensemble led by Caleb Landry Jones. Tsangari completed the feature in northern Scotland earlier this year without much publicity. The pic is a loose adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel of the same name. The film’s synopsis reads: Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears. In Tsangari’s tragicomic take on a Western, townsman turned-farmer Walter Thirsk and befuddled lord of the manor Charles Kent are childhood friends about to face an invasion from the outside world: the trauma of modernity.
Tsangari wrote the screenplay alongside Joslyn Barnes. The film was produced by Rebecca O’Brien (Sixteen Films), and Joslyn Barnes (Louverture Films) alongside Match Factory Productions, Tsangari’s Haos Film, and Meraki Film.
Alongside Jones, the film stars Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, and Frank Dillane. Sean Price Williams was the DoP and the film was edited by Matt Johnson and Nico Leunen.
Tsangari has described Harvest as a film about “reckoning.”
“What have we done? Where do we go from here? How can we salvage our soil, the self within the commons? Harvest takes place in a threshold realm, tracing the first ruptures of the industrial “revolution”. And revolution it hasn’t been,” she said in her artistic statement.
“An agrarian community is disrupted by three breeds of outsiders: the map-maker, the people on the move, and the company man—all archetypes of shattering change. The future is not part of the story—it will happen offscreen, in a world we are not meant to see. There are no heroes. Only imperfect, ordinary folks. I imagined it as a daguerreotype, or its modern equivalent, a Polaroid being slowly exposed to twilight.”
Check out the teaser clip above.