Les Moissonneurs
(Les Moissonneurs)

In post-apartheid South Africa, a white farming community in a fervently religious enclave in the Free State Province, is intent on keeping alive the values of a world that is indifferent to change and the impacts of passing time. The life of teenager Janno is upended when Pieter, a young delinquent, suddenly arrives in his family and his mother sets herself the holy mission of integrating the newcomer on equal footing with her other children. Pieter is imposed as his adoptive brother but turns into something very different for him. Shot mainly in Afrikaans, Etienne Kallos’s debut feature film challenges, as do other recent South African films, the unhealthy toxic tropes of a masculinity that is strictly standardised in this society. As in Oliver Hermanus’s Beauty or John Trengrove’s The Wound, one must yield to the prevailing norm or else lose one’s place in a world that, in the case of The Harvesters, offers no prospects for the future. JB