The genre-hopping director’s new work is a haunting pastoral feature about the destruction of a village. She talks ‘traumatic’ reviews, the film’s spectacular Romanian rock-inspired soundscape, and the problem with Greek cinema
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hand emerges from sheaves of wheat waving in the wind. Then we see a face, trying to eat moss on a log, and a tongue searching for liquid in rocks. When Caleb Landry Jones (Dogman, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) fully emerges, his blue cape flows like a toga or a Japanese courtier’s cape, close mics capturing every tiny sound – and then exhilarating Romanian prog rock kicks in.
Harvest has been described as a folk horror film – one that has sharply divided the critics – but its trippy, haunting opening, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker, introduces something far stranger than that. It’s been a “very personal film” for its genre-hopping Greek new wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose previous work includes an avant garde commentary on Greek society (Attenberg), a twisted male friendship comedy (Chevalier) and a BBC Two series about a throuple (Trigonometry).
Today, the 59-year-old is presenting a retrospective of her movies at the New Horizons film festival in Poland, where Attenberg won best film in 2011. “It’s full of people in their 20s,” she says, smiling. “Really hardcore film buffs, who come for 10 days and watch like five, six films a day.” Harvest was a project brought to her by Joslyn Barnes, who was Oscar-nominated this year for the screenplay for US reform school drama Nickel Boys. “She had a script and a mood board already, so there was a world there. I just needed to figure out how and if I fitted in.”
