The industrious and passionate Greek filmmaker on her subtly apocalyptic new work, Harvest.
The playful surrealism of Greek writer/director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s 2012 second feature, Attenberg, landed her on the map of filmmakers to watch, while also providing a curious starting point for a journey that has taken in withering satire (2015’s Chevalier), small screen domestic comedy (2019’s Trigonometry, made for the BBC), and most recently, the existential historical epic (2024’s Harvest), adapted from the 2013 novel by Jim Crace and starring Caleb Landry Jones.
LWLies: As someone from Greece, were you ever conscious of an outsider perspective on the material of this novel?
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Tsangari: I felt like it was completely my story because I come from a long lineage of farmers who recently lost their island to a highway. It’s like the biggest highway that connects the centre of Athens all the way to the north. It literally went over my family’s ancestral land. We were labourers since I was like four years old. And it doesn’t matter what we’re doing in the city in the winter when we’re there, we were 100 per cent indoctrinated into the arts of the earth. So yes, it was a very personal. And also, I live in a borderland, a very poor border with migrants and migrant workers everywhere around me. So this particular historical moment, talking about the enclosure act, in a way, created the first recorded Western refugee movement.
Yet Harvest is political without being polemical; it does not romanticise the world that is being lost.
It was more about posing the questions and not giving any answers. And also not being judgmental about about the central hero’s, passivity. And the townsfolk, are they innocent and naïve? Is it a prelapsarian innocence, or are they all complicit in their own downfall? Are they pacifists or are they violent? They’re both, you know. Even the mapmaker, has he been co-opted or is he just a romantic? It’s about how easily the narcissism of artists can turn into a tool in the hands of power. And you kind of forget that it has a real-world impact as well; that people see it as having a real-world impact.
Tell us about working with Caleb Landry Jones and building this strange, anxious, passive character together.
I think he really suffered. And sometimes he would explode. He had to release all this tension. As a person himself, he’s just so proactive. He has so much respect for humanity. And he has such a such a strong code of honour. In terms of the story, there was so much against him that I think all of this conflict, all of this boiling inside him, really created a extraordinary world. And I would say he is inactive, but he’s not passive – because you can feel the tension inside him. You see it on his face, that he wants to do something. Yeah, but but feels like he can’t, it’s not his place. You know, he’s not quite ready to make a decision.
The film looks absolutely gorgeous, shot on film by Sean Price Williams. How did that collaboration work?
The first thing that I do is a playlist before I even start bringing in images, because he works with music as an inspiration. I come from theatre, so I shoot the entire scene. I don’t stop. We don’t do coverage. The fact that he works with natural light is perfect for me. And then he also knows, when he shoots with me, he’s just going to set up a few lights and then hardly change them. And we’re going to shoot 360 degrees. No one will ever know when they’re going to be on camera. There is a sacred handshake between us. A secret relationship where we don’t talk. We don’t need to.
