EAST OF TBILSI, GEORGIA, AMONG THE VINYARDS AND PASTURES, A NEW CROP IS BURGEONING: CRYPTOCURRENCY
THIS FEATURE-LENGTH VÉRITÉ DOCUMENTARY FROM
FILMMAKER MISHO ANTADZE EXPLORES THE COUNTRY’S PAST AS IT COLLIDES WITH A HIGH-TECH FUTURE
THE HARVEST
Street Date: October 6, 2020
DVD/Digital: $24.95
An Official Selection at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and
Full Frame, This Visually Arresting Award-Winner, Pulling Back the Curtain on Secretive Cryptocurrency Mining, Will Also Be Available
Via IndiePix Unlimited on Amazon Channels
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Georgia’s past collides with the future in the exquisitely filmed observational documentary, THE HARVEST, from filmmaker Misho Antadze (Shevchenko, The Many Faces of Comrade Gelovani).
In the ancient countryside, Georgia is softly making its way into the 21st century as the second largest exporter of bitcoins. In the region of Kakheti, just east of the capital city of Tbilisi, some 15% of the world’s cryptocurrency is mined, or “harvested” in a country that not long ago suffered daily power outages. And while bees still buzz in the flowery fields of the Gombori Pass, a louder buzzing is heard from the space-age machines that crackle and whir from their neon lit hives housed in empty villas, ushering in a new and thriving form of capitalism. Antadze also pulls back the curtain on the computer banks, in which so many of the rapid-fire, complex algorithms are solved. A hitherto hidden industry is fully visualized, with the motherboards, cooling fans and luminescent cabling of these noisy hives of virtual activity getting their big screen debut.
Once only home to vines and fruit, the rural Kakheti wine region sees the boundary between the natural and the virtual virtually eradicated. Cows placidly graze alongside satellite dishes in a bizarrely bucolic lunar-like landscape and dairy farms and server farms coexist. And as ruminations both droll and profound emerge among the intersections of pastoral rhythms and algorithms, fluid camerawork deftly dices the old and the new in long takes that picture placid protagonists working on the countryside or on computers, unaware that the landscape is changing – both literally and figuratively.
