Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, a MUBI release, is now in theaters in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024).
The films of Athina Rachel Tsangari have always showcased her sharp, almost anthropological eye for human behavior—ritual, gesture, group dynamics—with a mischievous knack for toying with genre. Attenberg (2010) twists grief into the spine of its coming-of-age-story, centering on characters who resist the primacy of language in favor of dry, awkward dance—stylized gestures that helped define the burgeoning Greek Weird Wave. (Tsangari also produced three early films by Yorgos Lanthimos, the movement’s principal exemplar.) In Chevalier (2015), she uses a ship-sequestered setting to darkly satirize the fragility of the male ego, bound up with capitalism’s relentless drive for dominance and self-optimization. All of these preoccupations resurface in Harvest, Tsangari’s most ambitious and porous work to date—a timely anti-western that finds small pastoral society cracking under the weight of impending modernity.
Adapted from Jim Crace’s 2013 novel, the film hovers around the ponderous nature-boy Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), a widower living among his late wife’s people. Walter acts as a mediator between the villagers and the lord of the manor, Kent (Harry Melling), his friend and former employer, who presides with goofy benevolence and outfits himself in the peasants’ same loose, homespun garb. Walter’s outsider status grows increasingly precarious as the community’s idyll is disrupted by the arrivals of successive intruders: a trio of nonwhite migrants, immediately pilloried and scapegoated; a cartographer (Arinze Kene) determined to find a “better name for everything” that the locals refer to simply as “the loch” or “the marsh”; and Kent’s cousin, eager to enclose the land—consolidating common pastures into private claims—to expand his sheep farming operation and maximize profits.
The gentle Walt—profoundly passive, but not cowardly—stands ill-prepared to confront the brutality that surrounds him. Though he is suspicious of the cartographer’s efforts, which recall colonial histories of displacement and erasure, he is soon enlisted to work alongside him. Intuitively aware of the fate that lies ahead, yet immobile against it (a paralysis made literal by a badly burned hand), he is in a way less a man than an embodiment of the land itself. The film’s opening shots reveal as much: his hand rising through the tall grass, then plunging into the warm, crumbling earth; his teeth pressing into the slick green musk of bark, his tongue slipping into the damp dark of a hollow tree, merging man and nature in visceral gesture.
Harvest reads as a period piece—or rather, a period-myth, as Tsangari scrambles temporal cues and evades historical and geographic specificity. The setting suggests a post-medieval, pre-industrial era, as does the characters’ subtitled speech, some of which is tinged with Scottish brogue, though they trade in contemporary, expletive-laden vernacular. Though unmoored in time, the film remains deeply rooted in its characters’ emotional truths and the tangible textures of their vanishing world. We watch the villagers move through life, at work and play, shearing sheep, crowning their seasonal “gleaning queen” with flowers, and drinking themselves into a goatish stupor. Tsangari never intimates a utopia exactly, but does present the rough solidity and satisfaction of communal life. Sean Price Williams’s brawny, kinetic 16mm camera finds more than a forlorn, Malickian beauty in violet sunsets and emerald hills, which are countered by the sullied reality of fetid mud and bruised skies that might erupt at any moment. The visual honesty takes from Tsangari’s own approach—her intimate sensitivity tempered by a steadfast aversion to sentimentality, and punctuated by sudden, acrid flashes of violence.
I spoke with Tsangari last fall, after Harvest screened at the New York Film Festival, following premieres in Toronto and Venice, to discuss the film’s long gestation, her approach to building this world, and the philosophical undercurrents running through it.
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: How did you approach adapting Jim Crace’s book?
ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI: It's a book that excels in its mystery. It drifts, and the characters speak very little. Walt narrates, but he’s never present in the action in the story. That was what initially attracted both Joslyn [Barnes] and I to the project—but it was quite the task for us to build a film around a character who not only is passive, but also never there. Most of the dialogue was gleaned from his interior monologue. In the end, we placed him in the scenes, at least as a witness. I wasn't interested in making a historical drama; it was important to have a more modern language in terms of image or sound or the acting itself. Jim never really locates the story geographically or temporally either.
NOTEBOOK: In Chevalier you show these different sides of masculinity, and Walt follows suit. He's very enthralled by nature, which is historically viewed as a feminine trait. He’s also not what you think of when you think of heroes in westerns, which I’ve heard you compare the film to.
TSANGARI: It is a western but in this primordial sense. Usually you have a community invaded by something—whether it’s evil, or progress, or money—and the hero typically saves the day. I was interested in a nihilistic western where the character is part of the community, but at the same time, an outsider. He truly doesn't belong. There is this displacement to the story. Then, in the end, the entire community is being displaced, just as he is. There is no redemption for him. It remains mysterious whether he’s going to stay or leave—this is actually a different ending than that of the book.
NOTEBOOK: I didn't know that.
TSANGARI: It’s a story that keeps repeating itself—it hasn’t stopped happening. The narrative is quite predictable. This wasn’t about making a film that follows the traditional evolution of a character or a world. It's more like a sense of drifting, a sensorial approach to this unfolding tragedy. I was not really interested in surprising anyone, the same way Jim wasn’t; that wasn’t his book.
You could also say it’s a kind of female western. To me, nature and the land are the biggest, ever-present characters. From the very beginning, there’s a feeling of grief and malaise. It’s an Eden—but one already aware that its end is near, because the land is no longer yielding as it should. In a way, they’ve already perished.
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Is this sensorial approach something that you talk about with your actors? I read Caleb say in an interview that everyone pushed against you, “from every fucking angle,” he says, including him as an actor, and that he he gave you “a hell of a time.” I'm curious what exactly that was like on set.
TSANGARI: I was actually surprised when I read this because I couldn't imagine an actor who was more dedicated and more inside his character as he was. He started with his dialect while he was in Los Angeles and when he came to rehearse he was already speaking Scottish. None of us ever heard him speak in his own accent. Ever. He even moved into his cottage and lived there until we started shooting. He hung out with the farmers shepherds in the area. He's a very intense actor with incredible energy, and also someone who is always very present—and always wants to change things and help. He was really playing his opposite as Walt. Sometimes, I think, he was fighting his character, which in the end was great for the part.
It was a difficult shoot—we were battling time constraints and had very little time to create something epic, also while fighting with nature. I chose this part of the world precisely because nature is so present, but, after dressing 60 people and bringing them down to a muddy field where it rained nonstop, we only had about five hours to shoot. That kind of practical stuff was really tough.
Even though we didn't have all the money we needed, in the end there was so much camaraderie among everyone that I couldn't be happier. It really felt like a process of community work—as we’re making a film about the dissolution and disappearance of a community. It was strange, but in a way, creating this film in such a handmade, solidarity-driven way felt like our response to alienation—which is also prevalent in how films are made today. There’s often a detached and isolating experience. Working so closely with everyone together and shooting almost nonstop in this film, it felt more like entering a trance, cast and crew. We moved through scenes from beginning to end without traditional coverage or breaks. It was less about “making a film” in the conventional sense, and more about documenting the work of a community—almost like capturing the onset of an apocalyptic future.
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: I’ve read some of the book, and I was struck by how rich and mysterious the prose feels. Your film captures that beautifully; it’s so textured but maintains a certain distance, which seems to come from many of these choices you made that you’re talking about now. How did you build this tapestry of gestures and glances? Even though there’s dialogue, so much of the story is carried by what remains unsaid.
TSANGARI: Yes, it was very much a gestural process. I kept returning to the land—first on my own, then with my producer, Rebecca O’Brien, when we first found the location. I wanted the whole film to feel like the walkabout that the character Quill takes with Walt—to sort of understand the grace of this land; of the light; and then be able to offer it back through another kind of chemistry: the film, celluloid. It was an immediate decision I made with Sean [Price Williams] that even with a small budget we would shoot on 16mm. Instead of spending hours on lighting and coverage, we would enter the set, our little village, and we would just move together through each scene, without breaking it. So everything—the glances, the bodies, the ground, the mud, the colors—was equally important.
And also, the fact that the villagers were all real people from the area was essential. Alongside our casting director, Shaheen Baig, we spent a lot of time finding them—people who had actually worked the land. They sheared sheep, they harvested. The land itself hadn’t been plowed for centuries, so it was important for us to restore that connection. You know we actually brought the seeds back. We sourced heirloom seeds from that period, with help from Scotland the Bread, an incredible organization dedicated to reviving and reintroducing heritage grains to land that hasn’t been arable for a long time. So we sowed the seeds, we plowed the earth. The actors learned how, and when the time came, we truly harvested the grain ourselves.
And from now on, this land is going to be cultivated again because we proved that it can be. Everyone who was there felt deeply moved. We were, in a sense, honoring their ancestors who had once worked this land before it was abandoned long ago.
NOTEBOOK: The villagers have this ritual of hitting their heads on a stone to show they belong. Was that in the book? It feels like a very Athina moment, in tune with your other films.
TSANGARI: It was like two or three sentences narrated by Walt in the book, but it made such an impression on me. It is a very long story so it was all about gleaning the more gestural stuff. There was much more to it that we had to cut down. I thought the image was very precisely saying everything in the film that is tragic and, at the same time, funny.
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Was there a historical reference point for the costumes? I was especially struck by the villagers’ clothing. The vivid colors felt almost magisterial, like they were lending them a sense of pride and collective identity.
TSANGARI Not at all. It's the opposite, actually. I didn’t want to create historical costumes. Together with our costume designer, Kirsty Halliday, we focused on designing clothing that felt unplaceable, as though it could belong anywhere. The idea of the wrap or kilt, for example, is common across many agrarian societies—in India, Africa, Japan, Greece, Mexico. It was actually beautiful. She got yards and yards and yards of wool and line and then hand-dyed all of it using natural dyes made from local plants. It was a beautiful ritual in a movie that was full of them, behind or in front of the camera. Everyone would lie on the floor, and Kirsty would wrap each person individually and differently—almost like you would swaddle a baby—so every single villager character had their own unique way.
NOTEBOOK: On the topic of historical elements, I was curious about the character of Quill as well as some of the displaced people who arrive in the story. He’s Black, and a few of the others also appear not to be white. Was that a conscious decision? I saw that as a way to bring the story into the present, echoing the experiences of people around the world who are being displaced from their own land and homes.
TSANGARI: It was completely intentional. In the book, Mistress Beldam is described as having very dark hair, especially in relation to a community that’s described as mostly blonde or ginger. From the moment I read her character, I thought of Thalissa Teixeira, who I’d worked with before. She brought this really feral energy to the role and also refused to wear a wig—she shaved her head, which was a real sacrifice. As for Arinzé Kene, I’ve admired him for a long time—not just as an actor, but as a playwright, director, dancer, choreographer. He’s a true Renaissance man. The grace and humility he brought to the character were exactly what we needed.
We spent a lot of time rehearsing before we started shooting and had many conversations about the characters. And we made a clear decision: It wasn’t necessary—or even helpful—to explain their race within the story. It was far more important not to mention it at all.I mean, it’s obvious—from the moment they arrive, they’re attacked, ostracized, and immediately made into scapegoats. Even in a society that doesn’t have the language for skin color or xenophobia, the people’s reactions are deeply human: suspicion and hostility toward those who don’t look like you.
I was actually surprised to see a few reviews mentioning that it was strange I didn’t make a bigger deal out of it. It is a big deal—but to me it’s right there in the way the characters behave, in their reactions. To spell it out would have undermined the whole approach of the film, which resists explicit dialogue.
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: This resistance to language is something that's struck me about your films all the time—that and the way you observe human behavior and capture peculiarities—almost like we’re animals being studied as a species. There are these moments of dance or physical expression, ways of communicating that go beyond speech. Do you have a sense of where that impulse comes from in your work as a filmmaker and storyteller?
TSANGARI: You know, I’m not entirely sure. Even in [Chevalier]—where the characters were constantly talking—it never felt like they were really saying anything. To me, it wasn’t about words. The words weren’t advancing the story. It was more like a noise, like a herd of small animals expressing pain. I think to some extent, that’s what all my films are about: the pain of being human. How do you express this pain and this sense of loss while at the same time you're living in the present?
Because I come from theater, I’ve also always been drawn to movement, to non-verbal expression—more abstract forms, like the Theatre of the Absurd—where repetition or wordplay is used to express the discomfort of language itself. For me, that discomfort is something I try to explore through body language. The first script is a roadmap, something to communicate the idea of the film, that it should be funded and cast. But rehearsals are where I really write the script. We rehearse non-verbally—every single scene is basically just a dance at first. Everyone finds their own way of dancing, whether it's mimicking an animal or something else. I glean from all of this like a dramaturge, and at the end of each day, I transcribe all the changes that have happened. By then the body language and glances and gestures have basically replaced, in the most wonderful way, all the stupid dialogue that I sat down and wrote at my desk.
NOTEBOOK: You're having the body speak. Is that method of rehearsal unique to Harvest or do you do it for all films?
TSANGARI: All of the films. I work the same way, even though I’ve collaborated with different cinematographers. I shoot the entire scene without stopping. We stop when the scene ends of course, but the actors never really know exactly when they’re on camera or not. Then we do a second take where we choreograph the movement together. Like in this film, I worked closely with Sean because most of the camera work was handheld. He has the same sensory approach. It's a very silent shoot. No one speaks. Everyone knows exactly where they are, sort of like a silent ceremony. No one asks if they're on camera or not. The sound mixer [David Bowtle-McMillan] was incredible. Everyone could speak or not speak whenever they wanted, without being told it was not loud enough or clear enough. We just took everything as it was, like a loom where we threaded all these different sounds. Nicolas Becker, the sound designer, put contact mics on the ground, and he recorded the earth, every single creature, every single plant, so the base of the soundtrack is basically like the rumbling, the whispers of the earth, like the subconscious of this community that's about to be extracted from this land.