Followed by a talk with the director via Zoom on Saturday 24th May!

At one point in the gritty folk-fable Harvest, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landy Jones), a farmer and former manservant to the lord of an agricultural collective (Henry Melling), describes his community as “circle people”. In other words, their way of life stands against a linear view of history and capitalism’s relentless quantification of value. Thirsk’s people—as the film shows through a fiery portent and the eventual arrival of snivelling aristocrats aiming to modernise (i.e. extract wealth from) their lands—will soon be surplus to requirement. Directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg) and shot in grainy 16mm by cinematographer Sean Price Williams, this eerie allegorical drama immerses the viewer in the pagan traditions of a pre-industrial English village, which is not only being threatened from the outside but also rotting from the inside; its xenophobic inhabitants are quick to violently persecute a trio of innocent visitors. A feat of worldbuilding smeared with mud, semen and grass stains, Harvest is a hypnotic portrait of cultural decay and the first English-language feature from one of Greece’s most audacious filmmakers.

There’s a wildness and a pagan spirit to the film’s energy. At times, it feels like a painting of a peasant bacchanale in all its grubby, profane glory. It’s a film about the unravelling of a way of life; as such, it can feel that some of the power dissipates as this small community disintegrates. Even so, this is pungent filmmaking which creates a world steeped in superstition, ritual and folk-magic. - Screen Daily