Seoul festival awards ‘The Harvest’ by filmmaker Misho Antadze
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Georgian director Misho Antadze’s documentary The Harvest collected the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC)’s Award at the Jeonju International Film Festival in Seoul this week, distinguishing the film about the relationship between nature, technology, and the changing landscape.
The feature-length work, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year, was singled out by judges of the NETPAC organisation to claim the prize as winners of the South Korean event were revealed on Wednesday.
Antadze initially developed the concept of the documentary as a “project to explore the gold rush of cryptocurrency mining in the rural region of Kakheti in Georgia".
However, The Harvest eventually evolved into a look at "relationship between nature, technology, and the changing landscape", placing the rise of the digital currency in the context of the agricultural winemaking province.
Antadze has developed a close observational style of documentary filmmaking that almost entirely dispenses with verbal commentary.
His previous works have been visually arresting and rich in atmosphere, and The Harvest continues in this vein,” a review by the East European Film Bulletin said about the feature.
The review called the film “almost entirely unique” in the way it used artistic portrayal to bring to the audience the subject of technology behind Bitcoin mining, and noted the director’s “subtly ambivalent study of the impacts of this technology” on the region he captured on his lens.
For Antadze, the documentary follows the feature The Many Faces of Comrade Gelovani (2014) and the short Mariachi Plaza (2017).
The Harvest received the NETPAC Award at the anniversary 20th edition of the Seoul festival, which is running between May 2-11.
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