HARVEST

Synopsis

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.

Statement of the director(s)

With this film, an adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel ‘Harvest’, we had the chance to examine the moment when it all began for us, 21st century heirs to a universal story of land loss. To me, HARVEST is 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.
An agrarian community is disrupted by three breeds of outsiders: the mapmaker, 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 off screen, 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.