HARVEST
Venice 81 – Competition
United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, France, USA, 2024 Director Athina Rachel Tsangari Starring Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, Frank Dillane Running time 131′
Athina Rachel Tsangari returns to Venice after many years. She attended in 2010 with her second feature, Attenberg, which won the Coppa Volpi for actress Ariane Labed. Harvest is her fourth work, based on the novel by Jim Crace. It is set in a remote village in the Scottish countryside in the late 1500s, at the end of the agricultural revolution that transformed land from collective to property under landowners’ direct and legal control. Over a week, we follow Walter Thirsk, a city man turned agriculturist, and his awkward landowner and childhood friend Charles Kent. They face the trauma of modernity in a kind of tragicomic interpretation of the western genre. ‘Harvest is a film about reckoning’, Tsangari explains in the director’s notes, ‘which takes place in a liminal world and illustrates the first cracks in the Industrial Revolution. There are no heroes, just ordinary, imperfect people. I imagined it as a daguerreotype, or its modern equivalent, a Polaroid slowly exposed at dusk’. The film is shot in 16mm with a hefty grain precisely to enhance the meticulous reconstruction of the environments and atmospheres of the time. Among the protagonists are Caleb Landry Jones, back in Venice after last year’s splendid performance in Dogman; Harry Melling, a.k.a. Dudley Dursley from Harry Potter, and Rosy McEwen, star of Blue Jean, the film that won the BNL Audience Award at Venice Days 2022.
