Athina Rachel Tsangari’s fourth feature film Harvest is also her first in English. Set in an indistinct historical period it is the story of a small crofting village that faces extinction due to the Enclosure Act. Based on Jim Crace’s novel and adapted by Joslyn Barnes (who also co-adapted the stunning Nickel Boys with RaMell Ross) the film springs from the gloriously untouched land of the Scots-Mummerset border during the time of harvest and gleaning. Starring Caleb Landry-Jones, Rosy McEwan, Harry Melling, Arinzé Kene, and Frank Dillane, Harvest is both steeped in realism and hyper-realism as it explores the lives of people who own little, including the land they make their living on.
Nadine Whitney spoke to Athina ahead of the film’s premiere at Sydney Film Festival on 7 & 8 June 2025. Tickets are available via SFF.org.au.
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Athina, you are a fantastic director, and with Harvest you've reached far beyond know the Greek New Wave pocket that you've been put in with films such as Attenberg and Chevalier. Can you tell me about what attracted you to Jim Crace's novel?
Athina Tsangari: It attracted my producers first, especially Joslyn Barnes, who initially got the option rights from Jim, so it was her choice. She actually did the first draft of the adaptation, and then along with Rebecca O'Brien from 16 Films and Michael Weber from Match Factory they were looking for a director, and my name was thrown in the hat. They sent me the book and the first draft at the beginning of the pandemic, actually a little bit before the pandemic, while I was finishing my series Trigonometry.
Trigonometry is just such a different world to film. I was totally in it while I was trying to finish it, engrossed by the whole process of making a TV series and all the intricacies of this different language (English), which really helped me a lot in making Harvest because it gave me speed. After reading the novel and Joslyn’s draft I decided that I really wanted to spend the next years of my life making a movie based on it. It expressed how I felt, and how I still feel, which is how it feels for the world to be falling apart around you, and to be doing nothing, to be feeling that you can't really do anything that makes a difference.
Which is where Walt (Caleb Landry Jones) is in the in the film…
AT: All the villagers, the entire community.
One of the things Walt says is that “We are so meek.” We are easy to take advantage of when Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) comes to take the area from Master Kent (Harry Melling). They’re not really that that meek. It's just they're that disempowered.
AT: They're unfit to fight. They're almost unfit to recognise violence especially Master Jordan's violence, which is quite insipid. He himself is not really a villain, he's just a man of the future. He’s someone who has a different kind of rationale about what's useful and what's not. I made sure that we obliterated this dichotomy between the villain and the hero and bad and good.
That comes through with mapmaker Mr. Quill or Philip (Arinzé Kene). He’s not a bad man, but every time he draws a village, an enclosure happens. He knows that what he's doing is going to be a part of the demise of a place that he's fallen in love with. Walt gets along with him so well, up until a point where they have philosophical and practical differences.
Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like filming in Scotland? Because it really is so very beautiful. And filming with Sean Price Williams, who is on another level of genius as a cinematographer.
AT: The beauty that you see on the screen; it was a beauty that we shared as a community. I think that's it. You know, it seeped through, which is what we intended. Once a community is built, and we all decide to fully experience it in more than simply going to work. We were living together and really making this movie together, which in cinema is rarely the case anymore unless you have very small, tight knit independent films.
It always has to do with the code by which I build each film and the code for Harvest was the symbiosis between nature and human. Not just in the story itself, but the way that we worked.
The symbiosis is not simply farming; the harvesting and the gleaning and how that that brings the community together. It is also in the discovery of what the area offers in terms of medicines, nourishment, and memory. Walter at one point says to the mapmaker, “Your map is a lie, because you're flattening us… You've never walked these places.” Is that the kind of human and the land connection you're expressing?
AT: Yes, exactly. We walked the land several times, all together. We slept outside, and we followed the sun in the way we're shooting. It's two summers ago, and I feel that we all felt like we were under the spell of this beauty, this fleeting beauty, as the season was changing and at the same time of this disappearing world in the film.
You dedicate the film to your grandparents, whose farmland became a highway. The notion of farming land being reclaimed and repurposed still happens. Is that something that you brought into how you crafted the film?
AT: There was definitely a very personal reason. It's a very lived experience. I grew up in farms and I ploughed and seeded and harvested myself many summers. In the summer, our parents would park us in my dad's ancestral land, and we would just be there from June until beginning of September. And we were not spared! From babies until about our late teens, we were basically doing this hard work every summer.
Everything I am I've learned through that connection with my ancestral land, and the kind of sensory relationship I have to the world and with cinema come from that. It's a process that takes a very long time and needs to be a patient process, and to be very careful.
Sometimes there is harvest, and sometimes there isn't, because of the weather or there is a pest that destroys everything. So, there is a sense of fatality and fatalism that comes along with that, that is following me in the way I work as a filmmaker.
With that specific place that we found in Argyllshire we also chose it because it hadn't been cultivated in centuries. It was one of the places that the first Enclosure Acts happened. We spent lots of time finding the heirloom seeds to resow that that soil that hadn't been arable. And our incredible landlord, whose land has been in his family for a long time, was so gracious about that, and now he will keep cultivating it.
You’ve seeded not only an idea by making a film, but also literally seeded the land: that's a very beautiful thing to do. That matches the kind of lyrical, then fatalistic end as well. The sheer joy of the land is really shown through Caleb Landry Jones as Walter in the opening scenes. Experiencing everything that he can; biting down on moss and bark, licking a tree (as one does), swimming and paying attention to the insects.
Was it a challenge to shoot those very intimate moments with such naturalism?
AT: That's all Caleb. He's a fearless, feverish and ferocious actor. This whole opening scene was never in the script. But as we started walking together, and I could see him in front of me becoming Walt. During the month of the rehearsals, before rehearsals and walkabouts, we said, “Okay, let's just start. The first day should just be just you [Caleb], Sean and our sound recordist and me, and just walk and shoot and see how this is gonna work as a little test.”
We basically just followed him around. The only thing I said is that it's good to start a movie understanding his enchantment. He is almost like a baby in this land which is the only thing he's got although he doesn't even come from there originally.
But he's rooted to it because his wife is there as such, and Master Kent. It's an incredible set of scenes. So luscious.
You haven't set a specific time period in there, because the possibility of putting someone on trial for witchcraft, and the crofting farmers during enclosures didn't match up with that particular period in history. Were you trying to symbolise the eternal kind of change that happens with capitalism?
AT: Exactly. And I know that there is some of our viewers who have been scandalised by that. But you know, Jim Crace all of his works are atemporal, they're historical fiction, but the same time there's also science fiction. There's something very science fiction about all of his books. So, yeah, I mean, he was not specific about the era he was alluding to.
I followed his lead, which very much suits the way I work. The clearances started happening for the course of like, two centuries later. But I completely embrace the idea that if we're going to be precious with how things look, or how accents sound, or if witches were being burned while the enclosures, it's not that there's still witch burning in literal and metaphorical way, and there's still enclosures, and there's still brown people suddenly showing up and needing our help, and being up in all sorts of Pillories. So, nothing has changed.
That's what I felt, was that you were not being specific because you were talking about an eternal pattern.
I think too for the visuals of the film to really hit home, you have that sort of pagan ritual of harvest, which is so incredibly, beautifully shot. And not Christian, but not godless either.
Can you tell me about filming that particular section, harvest section? Because it's joyous and it's kind of disorienting, but it's a sublime piece, and the music is stunning.
AT: Yeah, especially the dance and the and the Corn Dolly burning – that one hallucinatory night, which we actually shot in the night. It was really crazy shooting while it was pouring rain. We had rehearsed the dance for a very long time; and for the first time, I worked with a choreographer, a brilliant maverick of contemporary dance, Holly Blakey. Holly was such an incredible gift because I was start with my rehearsals with movement and dancing, just through the body to express the script and the characters and the rhythm and the story and everything through the body before speech ever comes into our rehearsals. So, to have Holly working with everyone for about a week before I even showed my face on the dance with music that these incredibly genius young musicians that we had found in high school. To have original music, traditional music, performed by those such talented kids, and having everyone rehearsing the dance.
By the time we actually got to the set, everyone knew their partners and knew the moves, it started raining, became a kind of big very pagan kind of affair. It lost control, as it should; it's as if we're all on mushrooms. We weren't, but the spirit of what the night was supposed to be had completely sipped through everyone.
Everyone got into a trance; like what you see is actually what really happened. Everyone literally became this moving, pulsating, manic body. It happened, really happened, and I was just there witnessing it. You can't just tell someone to do that. There's a whole very intimate spiritual preparation. And I believe in the spirituality of the process of cinema making something on for the screen. The screen needs to somehow carry this electric current.
Your work pulsates with a particular rhythm. In Attenberg, movement is so important. The women both use movement as a way to speak to each other. Movement is central to The Capsule. You also produced Yorgos Lanthimos’ Alps and Kinetta where movement was essential.
AT: Another thing I should say about the music is that Caleb composed the score. We had the traditional music, but the score was actually composed by Caleb and my partner, Ian Hassett, who's a composer, and Nicola Baker, a sound designer. So it was, again, another collective endeavour, and we really did it live. So, responding live to the scenes.
It's extraordinary. I knew Caleb was a musician. I've heard some of his work.
AT: It is such a stellar cast – Caleb, Frank Dillane, Rosy McEwan, Harry Melling, and I'm so proud of all of them. I think it's nice to see Harvest. I think just for the cast, because they're just phenomenal. And also, they just got so close with each other. They're best friends. That's the true collective. It makes me like a proud mum.