The Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari has developed a distinct mode of filmmaking through her repeated focus on questions of body language, geography, and identity. With her new film Harvest, a period piece about the division of land starring Caleb Landry Jones and shot beautifully by Sean Price Williams, playing at the 62nd New York Film Festival, we’re looking back at her singular feature debut: The Slow Business of Going.

For a while, Tsangari believed The Slow Business of Going (or Slowbiz, as she refers to it) was the only film she’d ever direct. It was her student thesis film at the University of Texas and she made sure to incorporate everything she wanted to say about the world in it, in addition to including footage she shot all over the globe on Super-8 and mini-DV. The result — a zigzagging assessment of globalization at the turn of the millennium — is as anarchic in its blend of genres as it is exacting in its philosophical commentary, proving Tsangari was adept at toying with form and narrative from the get-go.

 

“I did not ‘decide’ to make this movie. It sort of happened on its own, sometimes despite myself and itself! Throughout the five years of its making, it ended up being more like a quilt, a patchwork of autobiographies, geographies and genres.” ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI

The inevitable quality of Slowbiz also owes its origins to Tsangari’s influences: a list of filmmakers who worked in a largely improvisational and collaborative manner such as John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, and Jean Luc-Godard. Then, there’s the sci-fi elements of the film, which concern a cyborg traveling across continents for the Global Nomad Project, and her creeping realization that so much of the world has begun to look the same. At the time, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and economic globalization on the rise, Tsangari became interested in “the Ikea colonization of space.” Her diagnosis — a smart, funny, and accurate short-hand for the homogenizing effect globalization dealt the world  — reflects her style as a filmmaker who is unafraid of mixing high- and low-brow instincts to interrogate long-standing social norms from unseen perspectives.

Athina Rachel Tsangari was born in Athens, Greece, in 1966. She studied philosophy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, earned an MA in performance studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and an MFA in film directing from the University of Texas in Austin. Her feature debut was the winner of the Best Narrative Feature Award at the New York Underground Film Festival in 2002 and her follow-up, Attenberg, won her multiple awards at FICUNAM, AFI Fest, Thessaloniki Film Festival, and the Venice Film Festival. She also produced Yorgos Lanthimos’s first three features (Kinetta, Dogtooth, Alps) and Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013). Her most recent effort, Harvest, was based on a script that Joslyn Barnes (producer of Nickel Boys and Zama, among other great films) adapted from Jim Crace’s celebrated novel of the same name.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer