The first English-language feature by one of the key filmmakers of the Greek Weird Wave Athina Rachel Tsangari immerses the viewer in the life of a Scottish village on the cusp of the agricultural revolution. The film took part in the main competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival.
Walt (Caleb Landry Jones) is a guide to a remote village, the nhabitants of which still perform pagan rituals. Born elsewhere but now a local in the place where his wife is buried, he becomes an assistant to a visiting cartographer invited to map the land, name it, and mark its boundaries for the new owner. The common field will become pasturage, breaking the centuries-old ties between the land and its people. Walt is left to witness the crumbling of the familiar world.
A neutral document at first sight, the map launches an irreversible process: the conversion of a sensory, lived experience of space into abstract, instrumental language of borders and property. In the film, this conflict is conveyed through the change of perspective: from tactile images shot on 16 mm (cinematography by Sean Price Williams) to a view from above, which does not allow the viewer to discern the tree bark, the moss, the crumbly soil and its living creatures.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
«Harvest»
Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari
UK, Germany, Greece, France, USA, 2024. 133 min
18+