Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari has described her new film Harvest as a 'nihilist western', rejecting the folk horror label often applied to it. The genre-hopping filmmaker's latest work, adapted from Jim Crace's Man Booker-nominated novel, depicts the destruction of a village over seven days. Shot in Oban, Scotland, it stars Caleb Landry Jones as Walter Thirsk, an outsider who never quite belongs.
Tsangari, speaking at the New Horizons film festival in Poland where she is presenting a retrospective, said she identified with two lead characters: Walter and Quill, a map-maker played by Arinzé Kene. 'As an artist, you are going to be complicit with some kind of system that’s going to try to co-opt you, devour you, or employ you to its service,' she explained. The film also features Harry Potter alumni Harry Melling and Frank Dillane.
The director drew inspiration from Peter Watkins' La Commune and 1970s westerns like McCabe and Mrs Miller. While the film has pagan elements, Tsangari insists it is more pastoral than horror. She deliberately avoided setting the story in a specific era, noting that 'the dissolution of communities, and the bordering up of land, the ghettoes, are happening literally everywhere now.'
Harvest is Tsangari's first feature in nearly a decade. She criticised the state of Greek cinema, citing a lack of government support and praising producer Christos V Konstantakopoulos for single-handedly financing much of the Greek new wave. Tsangari is now part of the Visibility: Zero campaign, which launched with an open letter from nearly 2,000 industry figures.
