A hand emerges from sheaves of wheat waving in the wind. Then we see a face, trying to eat moss on a log, and a tongue searching for liquid in rocks. When Caleb Landry Jones (Dogman, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) fully emerges, his blue cape flows like a toga or a Japanese courtier\u2019s cape, close mics capturing every tiny sound \u2013 and then exhilarating Romanian prog rock kicks in.<\/p>\n
Harvest has been described as a folk horror film \u2013 one that has sharply divided the critics \u2013 but its trippy, haunting opening, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau\u2019s unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker<\/a>, introduces something far stranger than that. It\u2019s been a \u201cvery personal film\u201d for its genre-hopping Greek new wave<\/a> director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose previous work includes an avant garde commentary on Greek society (Attenberg<\/a>), a twisted male friendship comedy (Chevalier<\/a>) and a BBC Two series about a throuple (Trigonometry<\/a>).<\/p>\n Today, the 59-year-old is presenting a retrospective of her movies at the New Horizons film festival in Poland, where Attenberg won best film in 2011. \u201cIt\u2019s full of people in their 20s,\u201d she says, smiling. \u201cReally hardcore film buffs, who come for 10 days and watch like five, six films a day.\u201d Harvest was a project brought to her by Joslyn Barnes, who was Oscar-nominated this year for the screenplay for US reform school drama Nickel Boys. \u201cShe had a script and a mood board already, so there was a world there. I just needed to figure out how and if I fitted in.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018He is someone who does not really belong and never will\u2019 \u2026 Caleb Landry Jones as Walter Thirsk in Harvest. Photograph: \u00a9 Jaclyn Martinez\/Harvest Film Limited<\/p>\n Adapted from Jim Crace\u2019s 2013 Man Booker prize-nominated novel of the same name, Harvest tells the story of the descent and destruction of a village over seven days. The cast is made up of local people from Oban in Scotland, where Harvest was filmed, and outsiders slowly enter the fray: two unnamed men who get put into stocks, a woman who is suspected of being a witch (Trigonometry\u2019s Thalissa Teixeira), and Quill (Arinz\u00e9 Kene), a map-maker tasked with charting the land.<\/p>\n Tsangari \u201ccompletely identified\u201d with two of the lead characters, she says: Walter Thirsk (played by Landry Jones) and Quill. Why? \u201c[Walter is] such a tragic, tragic character. You know, someone who does not really belong and he never will.\u201d And Quill? \u201cBecause he\u2019s the artist \u2013 his job is to draw and describe and name things. I suppose I was fearing that in the end. As an artist, you are going to be complicit with some kind of system that\u2019s going to try to co-opt you, devour you, or employ you to its service.\u201d<\/p>\n Two Harry Potter alumni also put in haunting appearances: Harry Melling is the town\u2019s weak-willed mayor and Frank Dillane, as his city cousin, arrives with a terrifying Witchfinder General vibe, as well as tall hat. Keen to preserve the novel\u2019s peculiar mood, Tsangari turned to her \u201ctreasure trove\u201d of favourite films, she says, including Peter Watkins\u2019 2000 docudrama La Commune (Paris, 1871)<\/a> and wayward 70s westerns McCabe and Mrs Miller<\/a> and The Missouri Breaks<\/a>. She doesn\u2019t buy that Harvest is a folk horror. \u201cIt\u2019s more pastoral \u2026 yes, there is paganism in it, but I\u2019ve called it a nihilist western.\u201d<\/p>\n The passivity of its characters as dread encroaches has a contemporary power, while Crace\u2019s setting of the story in an unspecified era \u2013 albeit with echoes of the Highland Clearances<\/a> \u2013 adds to its allegorical sheen. \u201cThe last thing I wanted to do was locate it and lodge it in a specific time,\u201d Tsangari says. \u201cEspecially since the dissolution of communities, and the bordering up of land, the ghettoes, are happening literally everywhere now.\u201d<\/p>\n An outsider entering the fray \u2026 Arinz\u00e9 Kene as Quill. Photograph: \u00a9 Jaclyn Martinez\/Harvest Film Limited<\/p>\n This is Tsangari\u2019s first full-length film as a director in nearly a decade. Greek cinema is in a dire state, she says. \u201cThere is not enough support by our government, especially after the big exodus Greek cinema has had in this century.\u201d She often worked with Yorgos Lanthimos before he found Hollywood success with The Lobster and The Favourite (she co-produced his Greek-language films Dogtooth<\/a> and Alps), but says the problems have been longstanding, citing one man as Greek cinema\u2019s saviour. \u201c[Producer] Christos V Konstantakopoulos single-handedly financed half of the Greek new wave<\/a> films. That\u2019s actually a fact.\u201d<\/p>\n She is now part of Visibility: Zero, a campaign launched with an open letter from nearly 2,000 signatories in June, demanding institutional reform within the Greek arts. Or as Tsangari puts it: \u201cIt\u2019s a revolt against the total disregard for the Greek cinema community by our state.\u201d Part of the problem is a cash rebate programme for non-Greek film-makers working in the country, she explains, that has prioritised movies with bigger budgets and squeezed indie productions.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an issue happening more and more in Europe \u2013 the whole industry is getting overextended, and then it becomes prohibitive for our very modest films to be made. It\u2019s also becoming more and more difficult to make films in my own language.\u201d A few days after we speak, 176 international actors, directors and producers, including Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe, signed a letter demanding that the Culture Ministry and the Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center \u2013 Creative Greece take immediate action<\/a>.<\/p>\n Twisted \u2026 Chevalier. Photograph: BFI<\/p>\n But back to Harvest, loved by some critics and hated by others. I ask if Tsangari likes making films that produce extreme reactions. \u201cI\u2019m not the right person to respond to this,\u201d she says. She doesn\u2019t read reviews, she adds, but admits to reading the Guardian\u2019s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw\u2019s negative take<\/a>. \u201cIt was the first one \u2026 a bit traumatic\u201d. Now she is focusing on travelling, she says, to present the film \u201cout in the world\u201d.<\/p>\n