Kicking off the first day of EFM, The Match Factory has released the first image from Athina Rachel Tsangari’s new film Harvest, starring Caleb Landry-Jones (2021 Cannes Best Actor, Nitram; Get Out; X-Men; First Class). The film is an adaptation of the Booker prize-nominated novel Harvest by Jim Crace, hailed as one of the best books of the 21st century by The Guardian.
Starring alongside Landry-Jones are Harry Melling (Harry Potter films, The Queen’s Gambit), Rosy McEwen (Blue Jean), Arinzé Kene (The Pass, Tuesday), Thalissa Teixeira (Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Trigonometry) and Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead, The Essex Serpent).
Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time, disappears. Harvest is a neo-Western about townsman-turned-farmer Walter Thirsk (Landry-Jones) and benevolent lord of the manor Charles Kent (Melling), childhood friends about to face an invasion from the outside world: the trauma of modernity.
A key figure in the Greek New Wave, Tsangari has established an international reputation with her films Attenberg (Copa Volpi, Venice 2010), The Capsule (Locarno 2012), Chevalier (Best Film, BFI London Film Festival 2015) and the BBC TV series Trigonometry (2020).
The feature was written by Joslyn Barnes and Athina Rachel Tsangari, and produced by Rebecca O’Brien (Sixteen Films), Joslyn Barnes (Louverture Films), Michael Weber and Viola Fügen (The Match Factory), Tsangari (Haos Film) and Marie-Elena Dyche (Meraki Films).
Harvest was filmed entirely on location in Scotland’s Argyllshire. Director of photography Sean Price-Williams, production designer Nathan Parker, costume designer Kirsty Halliday, editors Matt Johnson and Nico Leunen, sound designer Nicolas Becker and casting director Shaheen Baig round out a stellar artistic team.
Harvest is financed by Ashland Hill Media Finance and backed by BBC Film, Screen Scotland and Electric Shadow in the UK; Bayerischer Rundfunk ARTE and Film under Medienstiftung NRW in Germany; the National Centre of Audiovisual Media & Communication EKOME and the Greek Film Centre in Greece; Arte France, Arte France Cinéma and the Artemis Rising Foundation. The Match Factory is handling international sales.
Header image: Still from Harvest, credit Jaclyn Martinez