​A woman—a village elder—orders the children into a row. One by one, she ritually smacks their heads with force against a boundary stone. They must learn where they belong, she says. They must learn the violence of borders. For all that Harvest is a period piece, it is a film very much about the seeds of capitalism and the roots of genocides. It’s about ecological devastation and the exploitation of land for profit. It’s about how quickly the ruling class can eradicate ritual, relationships, nature. It's about those who act, and those who watch on in silence. It’s a film that thematically and narratively describes the history of land enclosures.

Harvest’s most visceral theme is land, and our rights and relationships to it. The film’s characters offer us a variety of perspectives on the earth, understanding it variously as nature, habitat, or resource; as a condition of belonging or alienation; as poetry and a source of magic; as something that is both controlled by humans, and beyond their control. Their interpretations and experiences are overlapping and contradictory. Harvest invites us to ask what land is used for, how it is described, and who wields power over it.

The film raises interesting questions about histories of land rights and how they are represented (or not) in popular culture, and I want to think about what that might mean for many of us in Britain as predominantly land-less people. The film's production team also used the earth as a resource themselves when shooting the picture, so it’s important to consider Harvest’s production contexts, and the impacts that filmmaking can have on local communities (something I've been researching in my Environmental Impact of Filmmaking project). 

What follows are my initial thoughts on the film. I open with a brief summary of the film (it does contain spoilers) and a short history of land enclosures. Next, I consider Harvest's treatment of power and blame, which I discuss first in terms of gender and racialised identity, and second in the context of national identity. Finally, I draw attention to the non-human--that is, wild--lives who are often left out of discussions about colonisation. 
​

The film opens on the penultimate day of harvest, as a fire tears through the dovecote of a small village. While action in the novel ostensibly takes place in an unnamed English village at an unknown point in time—this detail becomes important later—the film adaptation has a distinctly Scottish setting. It was shot mostly near Oban, and there are many Scottish accents among the cast (local people in the village where the production team worked appear in the film as extras). 
 
Following the fire, Walt, an outsider-turned-insider in the village, attempts to help the community with the last of the harvesting. Villagers shear, scythe, and sharpen; they roll the woollen fleeces of their denuded black sheep, and gather their corn crops in pathetically small bundles. The sounds of human tools manipulating plants and animals for human survival—the sounds of chopping, cutting, and threshing—are busy in the air. But Master Kent, the humorous and accidental landowner whose feudal benevolence affords the villagers a degree of autonomy that extends beyond their commoners’ rights, has other tasks for Walt. He is to assist a recently arrived visitor, Master Earle.
 
Quill is making maps: of the village, its houses, the common land, the fields, the manor. Land owners, and their erasure of wildness in favour of fences, grasslands, and sheep, are a plague about to sicken the village. The village’s traditional boundaries are about to be torn up, and the land enclosed. 
​

The villagers share historic, communal rights to common land where they graze animals, collect firewood and water, grow crops, and so on. We don’t really have a direct equivalent today, with class definitions and dynamics being both intersectional and necessarily slippery, and our own relationships—and rights—to land so changed. ‘Working-class’ isn’t quite analogous, as many people in occupations perceived as ‘middle-class’ are dependent on waged labour and struggle with living costs. ‘Land-less,’ while imperfect (owning a flat or a house is property ownership, after all), might be most appropriate, for the majority of people living in Britain do not have access or rights to land shared in common. Paying attention to specific national contexts, this is especially true for people living in England and Wales, who do not enjoy a ‘right to roam’ on privately owned land and tend not to hold property in common (which is not the case in Scotland).

Whether or not you identify with the villagers in Harvest (in their land loss, at least) is going to depend on your specific identity and experiences – but to my mind, many of us could, owing to rental contracts, mortgage indebtedness, or being deprived of relationships with and in nature.
 
Enclosures in England and Wales have varying starting dates, definitions, and so on, depending on who’s telling the story. For Marion Shoard, writing in 1987, they begin in 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded, occupied, and divided up the land among a self-imposed ruling class. In 1217 the Charter of the Forest, sibling legislation to Magna Carter, enshrined some commoners’ rights. Many of these rights were made precarious less than two decades later, when, in 1235, Henry III passed the Statute of Merton in England, which gave lords the right to enclose common land so long as there was ample resource for their tenants leftover.

​The scale and scope of that resource was not specified, however, and the land-owning class took advantage of that. From the 14th through 17th centuries, the ‘landed’ gentry enclosed vast swathes of England, often to pasture sheep, and forced people and wild lives off the land to cope as they might. Many instances of uprisings followed, such as the Levellers and Diggers in the 1600s. But the justice system’s response to even non-violent protest was brutal, and the penalties for anyone fighting back were high.[i] Following the ‘Last Labourers Revolt’ in 1830 (in which no land owners or allies died) nineteen people were hanged, 457 transported, and 600 imprisoned.[ii]
​

Following the dovecote fire, and recognising the slim pickings of their harvest, the film's villagers are on edge. They are suspicious of outsider Quill and his marking of their land on animal skin. Onscreen, Earle is Black, and has travelled to Britain from an unnamed African country. It's a not altogether successful departure from Crace's novel: in a strange racial role-reversal, there's something deeply uncomfortable about scenes in which the white villagers (rightly, within the narrative) identify Earle as complicit in the colonisation of their land. While allowing for complexity--relationships between identity and power are rarely straightforward--to me the film risks justifying the racism that underpins the villagers' interactions with Earle. They do not want him to touch their children, even before his role in enclosures becomes apparent. 

An already fraught time is made more uncertain by the arrival of three strangers, who arrive from across the loch on a small boat. The all-white villagers pillory the two newcomer men, and local woman Kitty Gosse brutally shears the Black woman's long hair to desexualise her before a crowd of ambivalent onlookers. In Earle, and the three refugees who have escaped a nearby land enclosure, the villagers find convenient scapegoats for every trouble that plagues them. If the film's racial politics are a little on the nose--refugees arriving by small boat who are blamed for working-class misfortune, Kitty's misogynoir against the so-called Mistress Beldam--they are nevertheless recognisable as ongoing violences in our own, contemporary British cultures. 

But there is also blame among the villagers. Outsider men like Walt, Master Kent (who inherited the land from his deceased wife, Lucy), and Earle are always watching, listening, and standing by while external forces wreak havoc beyond their perceived control. They see beauty in the world, in circular patterns that defy the linear coldness of boundary lines, while contributing to systems that destroy what they hold dear. Meanwhile the village-born men recognise and rail against injustice - and yet they, too, are unwilling to act on it. They stand back, and stand down, whenever a voice of higher authority commands them.  
 
Together, local and outsider men become the enemies of women like Kitty Gosse, her friend Ann Carr, and Mistress Beldam, who fight for the land and their bodily autonomy. Kitty strides through the village and rages with her fists against the men who accuse the Gleaning Queen, Lizzie, of witchcraft. Mistress Beldam crouches on the margins and runs like the wind, always beyond reach. Lizzie's mother slashes with a knife at the face of the man who helped to gaol the little girl. Men think; women act. The women in this world make everything necessary for human survival: food, clothing, resistance.

Of course, it is not the refugees seeking shelter who ultimately spell the end for the common people's way of life. Nor is it the bureaucratic men. Nor the villagers themselves. It is the English lord Edmund, the cousin of Master Kent’s deceased wife, has come to claim the estate. It is he who has commissioned Earle to make maps, and it’s his plan to end the villagers’ unprofitable subsistence farming and enclose the land for sheep. With their sideways glances and finger pointing at those who wish to live among them, the villagers have forgotten to look up. Harvest is a cautionary tale about what happens when we fail to spot the real enemy bearing down on us from above.

What is fascinating about Harvest is that the producers have transported John Crace’s 2013 novel from an isolated village in England to Scotland. The production team’s decision to shoot in Scotland was no doubt dependent on aesthetic and other considerations, such as the availability of suitable land to rent, production costs (including local tax breaks and bursaries for crew), and financing (the film is funded by Screen Scotland).[iii] Nevertheless, the geographical shift transforms the film’s historical resonance, with many film critics assuming the action takes place during the 1750-1860 Highland Clearances.[iv]
 
The ‘clearances’ took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, and were land enclosures often carried out by Scottish clan chiefs and English landowners. They are fairly well represented in film history, with Culloden (1964), Braveheart (1995), Outlander (2014-2016), Outlaw King (2018), and Robert the Bruce (2019) to name but a few.
 
Meanwhile stories about enclosure of commons in England or Wales are uncommon. Aside from Cromwell (1970) and Winstanley (1975), it’s been challenging to recall explicit references in British cinema, although two recent TV series do address the history (Cromwell oversees the dissolution of the monasteries in Wolf Hall, 2015-2024, and villagers area affected by creeping land privatisation in The Gallows Pole, 2023).

The dominance of the ruling, land-owning classes in the screen industries—and the ‘middle’ ones that are most likely to benefit from them financially—might have something to do with the absence. A 2024 report by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre showed that while working-class people make up 23% of the UK’s workforce, they represent just 8.4% of those working in film, TV, radio and photography.[v] The long histories of land invasion, language erasure, and cultural destruction that rulers in England have perpetrated against peoples across Britain, and the English colonisation of Ireland, might help to account for England's specific lack in this area, too. 
 
It’s hardly surprising, then, that histories of common people are missing from ‘English’ (by which I broadly mean films produced in England) national cinema. Convincing the land-less that they benefit from the colonisation of others helps to maintain the status quo; there's no telling what trouble might start if we all went around telling stories about land loss, or rather, land theft, in England. 

Thus, I have questions--which in no way seek to undermine arguments in favour of Scottish independence, which the film contributes to--about what Harvest doesn’t or can’t speak to in its adapted national context. What might it mean, I wonder, for audiences in England to engage with a story about land loss a little closer to home? How might (especially white) audiences in England respond to a film that positioned them as oppressed by a ruling class rather than by a feared and othered outsider? And where might opportunities for solidarity grow across borders if rather than national divides, people instead had class in common?
​

Beyond the impacts of colonisation in the human realm, I’m also interested in how land-loss is experienced by wild lives – that is, the birds, mammals, insects, arachnids, mosses, plants, fungi and so on that inhabit the earth. In Harvest, wild lives are akin to commoners, in that they simultaneously exist free of any externally imposed law and are mastered by others in a hierarchy. Shots of grasses, footprints, and hay-strewn commons are interspersed with slow montages of the living earth – a slug crawling, lichen blooming, rain pouring. There’s poetry to these sequences, not only in their sublime aesthetics, but also in their grammar. They punctuate human conflict and remind us of subjectivities, of temporalities and continuities, that exist outside of our own, often fast-paced and digitally mediated experiences. Villagers also are wild, cavorting in animal masks and immersing themselves in nature’s rhythms.

However, while Harvest depiction of wild lives onscreen encourages us to feel connected to nature, it also reminds us of our destructive tendencies--sometimes critical to our survival, sometimes not--toward our fellow beings. Humans slice beets and scythe corn. They cook and eat animal flesh. Doves smoulder in flames as a result of a drug-fuelled teenage rebellion against Master Kent; Mistress Beldam murders a horse to show her contempt for the villagers. When wild lives become property, they become subject to human violence. 

Harvest's own production will most likely have disturbed wild lives, too. With regard to filming near Oban, there is little public information about production activity aside from positive news coverage describing how the team worked with a local village to mitigate the impacts of the shoot's presence. Director Athina Rachel Tsangari said that the location was ‘like our own private studio, with lochs and hills.’ She paints an idyllic picture of working with local villagers, who appeared in the film, built sets, and made costumes. Moreover, accentuating the film’s authentic representation of the human cast and crew’s connections to the land, she suggests that they really did, over the two-year shoot, work the soil.[vi]

While I have no reason to doubt Tsangari’s account, I’m reluctant to take such proclamations at face value. Perhaps I’m cautious because there’s no acknowledgement in the journalist’s write-up of the impacts that filmmaking machinery—heavy vehicles, ground boards, cameras, lights and rigging—might have had on wild lives. And there it is again, that word: 'private'. The land is made available for the film's producers to hire by whoever 'owns' it, and so the land becomes a 'private' outdoor studio, a theme-park-like enclosure of lochs and hills, in which the creative team have paid to play. 
​

Humans, sadly, are the common cause of many threats to wild lives — yet many of us are affected by nature loss, too. Through ongoing projects of enclosure, private land owners have destroyed 49,000 miles of our public rights of way, and just 8% of countryside is accessible to us in England and Wales.[vii] And, as I suggested earlier on, enclosures—land grabs, colonisation, occupations—are often at the root of human conflicts around the globe.

It’s impossible to talk about Harvest in this context without thinking of the atrocities that successive British governments have committed against peoples around the globe. Colonisation underpins Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and US President Trump's demand for mineral extraction rights there in exchange for military support. Histories of colonial violence perpetrated by the Global North have led to the Israeli government and its allies, including the UK government, committing ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

Harvest, then, tells a story that is as relevant today as it was in fifteenth-century England or eighteenth-century Scotland. It is by turns bleak, violent, and moving, and--importantly--hopeful. For autumn is followed by winter, and so winter is inevitably followed by spring. Resistance is never futile, and it is never too late, whether it is by naming or not naming, sowing or destroying. 

​As you watch the film, I invite you to think about what land means to you, and how and where you encounter the earth. I encourage everyone to think about the possibilities for solidarity between all beings who have experienced land loss. And finally, I ask all of us to consider how Harvest’s characters, and we ourselves, might cultivate the seeds of change to restore wildness, and make a world that we share in common.

​[i] Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 

[ii] Marion Shoard, This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for the English Countryside (London: Paladin, 1987), 90.

[iii] Harvest paid into the Film Skills Fund, a UK placement initiative that provides bursaries enabling trainee crew members to work on large-scale productions, which resulted in four early-career positions for people based in Scotland. See ScreenSkills, ‘ScreenSkills in the Nations: Spotlight on Scotland,’ August 19, 2024, https://www.screenskills.com/news/screenskills-in-the-nations-spotlight-on-scotland/. According to the scheme’s website, it ‘provides “set-ready” training to talented individuals.’ Its eligibility criteria does not give preference to people from lower-income households or those from working-class backgrounds. See ScreenSkills, ‘Trainee Finder: guidance for future trainees,’ 2024, https://www.screenskills.com/training/trainee-finder/screenskills-trainee-finder/.  

[iv] Leslie Felperin, “‘Harvest’ Review: Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling Lead a Moving Scottish Highlands Period Drama,” Hollywood Reporter, September 3, 2024. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/harvest-review-caleb-landry-jones-1235989116/

[v] Rachel Healy, “Fewer than one in 10 arts workers in UK have working-class roots,” Guardian, May 18, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/article/2024/may/18/arts-workers-uk-working-class-roots-cultural-sector-diversity

​[vi] Ross Crae, “Oban Reaps the Harvest as New Film Showcases the Best of Argyll,” Sunday Post, July 13, 2025, https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-sunday-post-dundee/20250713/281895894263684?srsltid=AfmBOorJfRpZ8PCJ7TOATCkIPd9kJTOcJeMfuaIbngVpXMMTlz69Yy3r.

​[vii] Right to Roam, “What We're Campaigning For, 2025,” https://www.righttoroam.org.uk/about. 

By Rebecca Harrison.

Content note: This article discusses an occurrence of racist police violence in relation to authoritarian state infrastructures in the final section, which follows a clearly captioned photo of the author protesting.

​At one end of the busy shopping district, bordering the main square, an inauspicious building is tucked back from the road. It’s adjacent to a factory outlet store, and a Coop supermarket that has an in-store café with views over the sun-lit ski slopes beyond the nearby train station. Ordinarily, the inauspicious building might be a gym, or an art gallery, or a thriving coffee shop beloved by locals. Or it could be a hair salon, a restaurant, a souvenir shop full of postcards and fridge magnets that remind tourists of the cheerful, wholesome character of their Swiss winter holiday.
 
But today, the inauspicious building is none of these things. For, like most of the stores leading to the convention centre (where politicians, CEOs, government advisors, and countless SPADS, flunkies, and other hangers-on decide how best to extract planetary resources in the coming year) the space is home to a temporary, corporate tenant. Today, on the second day of the World Economic Forum, the inauspicious building is home to BlackRock.
 
Compared to the LED displays and bright-coloured banners of other shop fronts, the world’s largest asset management company has a demure presence on the Davos high street. Perhaps, given accusations that it funds environmental and human rights abuses, this is a tactic to avoid the attention of protestors (who have successfully targeted a near neighbour, with climate-justice activists dousing Amazon’s windows with paint further up the street). Or maybe, like a stalwart department store that quietly trades in socks and underpants, it doesn’t need flashy advertising to sell the essentials for pension securities – deforestation schemes, neocolonial land clearances, and arms manufacturing, for instance.
 
Further along the road, nestled between the town’s busy hotels and bars, the Amazon store is clean again. A heavy police presence, backed up by Border Control, backed up by military personnel stationed next to the helicopter landing site a few miles along the railway line, has made any form of dissent extremely challenging. Not that the authorities are moving fast: they crawl through traffic so dense it’s reminiscent of Oxford Street at Christmas time. Only instead of buses and cabs, there are bumper-to-bumper Mercedes, all inching along with blacked-out windows and mostly empty back seats. (It’s reassuring to note that once WEF attendees have flown in by private jet, they switch to cars to travel walkable distances around town. No one can say they’re not doing their bit for climate change).

​As you walk towards the convention centre—where Rachel Reeves is cutting taxes for the elite to stimulate ‘growth,’ David Beckham is collecting an award, and Donald Trump is threatening pretty much everyone—there are other familiar names advertising their wares. Meta is pushing AI. Tata sponsors a booth giving out free coffee (who has time to care about links to human rights abuses or environmental harm when they’re on the make and need a caffeine hit?). Cisco is at it with the AI again, assuring delegates that it’s ‘making AI work for you.’ Infosys talk of being ‘AI-first’ via ‘connected clouds’.
 
Then there’s the ‘AI House Association,’ located in a charming Swiss-style chalet and sponsored by the Swiss National AI Institute. At the Automation Anywhere hub, delegates are invited to use the company’s Agentic AI product to ‘build the future.’ Agentforce, meanwhile, promise global decisionmakers that the firm has ‘what AI was meant to be,’ claiming their product is 33% ‘more accurate’ and ‘2x more relevant’ than ‘DIY AI’. A cartoon robotic polar bear adorns their window as if to bolster the claims; it’s unclear whether any state or other advertising standards apply to temporary shops during the WEF.
 
Which makes it all the more terrifying that people are buying into what these stores are selling. For the governments, media, tech companies, and banks that control our daily lives are pushing AI wholesale. Yet the human and environmental costs of AI are too high. Gen-AI relies on large-language-models stealing the writing, images, and sounds that we have made freely available on the internet. Machines ‘scraping’ for ‘data’ is nothing short of corporate theft of our online publications. (Note that when US tech company OpenAI steals from us it’s ‘scraping’; when Chinese tech company DeepSeek allegedly takes from them it's ‘inappropriate’).
 
AI requires enormous extractivist activity alongside fossil power, land, and water resources; pollutants from data centres destroy communities and eco-systems. It does not, as many texts manufactured by gen-AI worryingly claim, contribute positively to environmental sustainability. And the racialised, gendered, and other biases that its programmers code into it are a continuation of earlier and ongoing projects of categorisation and discipline.
 
So when the C3.ai store promises WEF attendees that gen-AI that will undertake everything from ‘demand forecasting’ and ‘energy management’ (so far, so efficient), to ‘public benefits’ (who determines what is beneficial, and to whom?), and, critically, ‘law enforcement,’ we should be very, very worried indeed. On his first day in Davos, C3.ai CEO Thomas Siebal, a Trump donor and supporter, gave a speech praising the President at a party he hosted. Coming the day after Trump’s inauguration, attended by, among other Silicon Valley figures, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), and Elon Musk (X, xAI), AI’s proximity to authoritarian politics could not be any clearer.
 
Every AI search, I argue, reinforces an act of enclosure enabled both by the ruling class’s most recent theft of our knowledge and creative commons, and the authoritarian misuse of the state-held and other databases that we are made to digitally inhabit.

​As you pass C3.ai and near the barricaded entrance to the WEF proper, where security guards check delegate passes and bags, there’s a tasteful, wooden-slatted shopfront hosting Palantir. The US-based company specialises in software that enables the collection and analytics of large data sets, and—you guessed it—AI. Amnesty International UK has accused Palantir of facilitating human rights abuses in the US, where its platforms are used by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to separate migrant children from their parents and conduct raids on undocumented people. Palantir founder Peter Thiel is a Trump backer; CEO Alex Karp has denounced pro-Palestinian protestors as having ‘pagan’ beliefs and supports the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza. They hold NHS contracts in the UK. Theirs is the last shopfront you see before entering the invite-only conference hall (or should that be mall?). It’s also the first you would see when exiting.

​In Dan McQuillan’s book on AI he stops short of claiming AI is fascist. However, what I saw in Davos lends credence to his argument that it will be—already is—being used to support authoritarian regimes.

​Sandwiched, then, between BlackRock and Palantir, and abrasively promoting AI down its length, the WEF high street strips back the complexity of global capital. Everything politicians and CEOs need is here in a single, neat shopping district. This is where the superrich come to buy and sell, to trade in labour exploitation, unethical data use, technologies of oppression, and the depletion of life on our planet. Their jets and cars and private resorts were only ever window-dressing.
 
Up close, in person, the banality of such corruption and violence fills my partner and me with dread. It is nauseating. Even when you hold up a placard in protest (which I do, under intense scrutiny from passing delegates, mild interest from passing videographers, and, thankfully, very little interest from police), it is with a feeling of impotence. At home, in activist spaces, in universities, we strive to understand the entanglements between corporations and politicians, hedge funds and arms suppliers. Yet here, the system is almost too easy for me to comprehend. It has an uncannily familiar geography: you can buy mass surveillance software like a new kettle, or pick out a law-enforcement package as if choosing an all-inclusive holiday. It’s like a trip to Bluewater, or the Arndale Centre. Rather than shopping for pleasure, delegates shop for terror.

It's the familiarity that’s horrifying. It feels like I’ve reached the end of the yellow brick road, the end of the Baudrilliardian precession of simulacra. Everything, all of a sudden, is clarified, real. The purchases I make online, or even in supermarkets (Tata, for instance, owns Tetley tea), serve the companies profiting from oppression at the WEF. Hardly a startling revelation, yet it’s as if the browser windows and websites are dissolving into the cold, sunlit air. The discomfort of my familiarity heightens as my reflection stares back at me amid the spectacular window displays of neoliberal capital’s shop fronts. I am both out and in. Complicit.
 
And I have no idea how to tear the system down; no spectacular vision of capital-ending action has so far manifested, no quick-fix for ending centuries of human-made, machinated violence has thus ensued. Getting out, on a picturesque train journey that wended its way across ravines and down mountainsides, was only ever going to allow getting away.
 
On my journey home to the UK the next day, I step outside Gare du Nord and witness the French police making an unprovoked racist arrest; they grab the man’s hair as they forcibly remove his hat, and unpin a can of mace when his friends try to help him. They take his details, use bikes to encircle him, cuff him, put him in a car. I don’t know if his friends know where’ he’s going (my French is poor), or if they understand why I give them my details to share the photos I took of the cops. The police, of course, comprehend. They refuse to let me leave, demand my passport. They photograph it, warn me (it’s illegal to share images of on-duty cops in France), lie about the arrest. Depending on the vindictive: laziness ratio of the gendarmes, my details, too, will be entered onto a database (the outcome will not be so bad for me as a white, British woman).
 
The database will, of course, be designed by a company that tells governments it can predict terror, crime, extremism, based on machine-learned predictions. These will include profiles of Black man and women, disabled people, activists, many, many others across intersections of oppression and political marginalisation. People with cameras. People without. No one will have consented. Deserved it. Or likely know that it’s happening, because the violence is perpetrated beyond the visibility and familiarity of the street.
 
What I do know, though, is that at the heart of global capital there is nothing about a shopping centre. The elite, the powerful decision-makers whom we elect (or don’t), are merely market traders in a marketplace with very few ideas. We must leverage power by refusing to buy their products, and resist their sales pitches to reject their evolving weaponisation of AI. These are stores that we must put out of business to make social and environmental justice possible. The conference mall must go, and in its place we can build a better world.