‘I call it a nihilist western': director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her trippy folk horror Harvest

The Guardian

2 days ago

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's cape, close mics capturing every tiny sound – and then exhilarating Romanian prog rock kicks in.
Harvest has been described as a folk horror film – one that has sharply divided the critics – but its trippy, haunting opening, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker, introduces something far stranger than that. It's been a 'very personal film' for its genre-hopping Greek new wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose previous work includes an avant garde commentary on Greek society (Attenberg), a twisted male friendship comedy (Chevalier) and a BBC Two series about a throuple (Trigonometry).
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. 'It's full of people in their 20s,' she says, smiling. 'Really hardcore film buffs, who come for 10 days and watch like five, six films a day.' 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. 'She 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.'
Adapted from Jim Crace's 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's Thalissa Teixeira), and Quill (Arinzé Kene), a map-maker tasked with charting the land.
Tsangari 'completely identified' with two of the lead characters, she says: Walter Thirsk (played by Landry Jones) and Quill. Why? '[Walter is] such a tragic, tragic character. You know, someone who does not really belong and he never will.' And Quill? 'Because he's the artist – 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's going to try to co-opt you, devour you, or employ you to its service.'
Two Harry Potter alumni also put in haunting appearances: Harry Melling is the town's 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's peculiar mood, Tsangari turned to her 'treasure trove' of favourite films, she says, including Peter Watkins' 2000 docudrama La Commune (Paris, 1871) and wayward 70s westerns McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Missouri Breaks. She doesn't buy that Harvest is a folk horror. 'It's more pastoral … yes, there is paganism in it, but I've called it a nihilist western.'
The passivity of its characters as dread encroaches has a contemporary power, while Crace's setting of the story in an unspecified era – albeit with echoes of the Highland Clearances – adds to its allegorical sheen. 'The last thing I wanted to do was locate it and lodge it in a specific time,' Tsangari says. 'Especially since the dissolution of communities, and the bordering up of land, the ghettoes, are happening literally everywhere now.'
This is Tsangari's first full-length film as a director in nearly a decade. Greek cinema is in a dire state, she says. 'There is not enough support by our government, especially after the big exodus Greek cinema has had in this century.' 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 and Alps), but says the problems have been longstanding, citing one man as Greek cinema's saviour. '[Producer] Christos V Konstantakopoulos single-handedly financed half of the Greek new wave films. That's actually a fact.'
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: 'It's a revolt against the total disregard for the Greek cinema community by our state.' 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.
'It's an issue happening more and more in Europe – the whole industry is getting overextended, and then it becomes prohibitive for our very modest films to be made. It's also becoming more and more difficult to make films in my own language.' 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 – Creative Greece take immediate action.
But back to Harvest, loved by some critics and hated by others. I ask if Tsangari likes making films that produce extreme reactions. 'I'm not the right person to respond to this,' she says. She doesn't read reviews, she adds, but admits to reading the Guardian's chief film critic Peter Bradshaw's negative take. 'It was the first one … a bit traumatic'. Now she is focusing on travelling, she says, to present the film 'out in the world'.
She is much happier talking about the film's epic sound design. The fabulous opening track, by Romanian experimental one-man band Rodion GA, was made on cassette during the culturally punitive rule of Ceaușescu; she tells me excitedly that she got the masters from bandleader Rodion Roșca's daughter. She also loved building up a Harvest Family Band, which included Landry Jones (who is also a musician) and experimental recorder player Laura Cannell, with support from ethnomusicologist Gary West and Gaelic musicians Sarah and Anna Garvin.
Sound of Metal's award-winning composer Nicolas Becker and sound engineer David Bowtle-McMillan also bolstered the film's extreme sensory intensity, the latter often using 20 mics at one time, 'buried in the mud, when it was raining, like a Zen Buddha, as if he was mixing jazz,' Tsangari says with a laugh. Whatever your take on it, Harvest is a film that envelops you in its noise, that lingers, that you can't extract yourself from, I say. Tsangari smiles, perhaps with relief. 'That is literally music to my ears!'
Harvest is in cinemas on 25 July and on Mubi from 8 August.