Athina Rachel Sangari’s ‘Harvest’ Earns 7-Minute Ovation — Venice Film Festival

Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari marked her return to Venice this evening with the world premiere of competition title Harvest, which was unveiled to a 7-minute, 50-second ovation at the Sala Grande.

Cast members hugged Tsangari following the premiere, which received a warm reception from the audience.

Harvest stars an ensemble cast led by Caleb Landry Jones alongside Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira and Frank Dillane.

The film is a loose adaptation of Jim Crace’s novel of the same name. Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears. In this tragicomic take on the Western, townsman turned-farmer Walter Thirsk (Jones) and befuddled lord of the manor Charles Kent (Melling) are childhood friends about to face an invasion from the outside world: the trauma of modernity.

Tsangari has described Harvest as a film about “reckoning.” 

In her director’s statement Tsangari said, “Harvest takes place in a threshold realm, tracing the first ruptures of the industrial ‘revolution.’ And revolution it hasn’t been… An agrarian community is disrupted by three breeds of outsiders: the map-maker, the people on the move, and the company man — all archetypes of shattering change. The future is not part of the story — it will happen offscreen, in a world we are not meant to see. There are no heroes. Only imperfect, ordinary folks. I imagined it as a daguerreotype, or its modern equivalent, a Polaroid being slowly exposed to twilight.” 

MUBI has U.S. and UK rights; The Match Factory is handling world sales.