Harvest

Opium dulls pain. On this trip harvesting white poppies, Alma will not be able to escape her own.

Team

Laura Herrero Garvin

SpainDirector Scriptwriter

Jorge Gil Munarriz

SpainScriptwriter

synopsis

The fields of Toledo, Spain, are covered with white poppies every spring, a flower which attracts pickers from all over the world for the harvest. Alma (23) and Joan (32) travel there in their caravan to clandestinely collect the flower and extract its precious juice, opium. This is the first time Alma has come to the poppy fields. A few months ago, her mother died and when she met Joan, she found in him a way to escape her pain. Now everything revolves around Joan and the new and exciting nomadic way of life she is discovering with him. But it all starts to go wrong. Joan gets into serious trouble: the police catch him sneaking into a private opium plantation. If Alma wants to get him out of prison, she will have to raise a substantial amount of money. Trying to run away from her inner wound, she will desperately build bonds with different people she meets around the fields. In that environment of drug trafficking, which she does not know, those encounters will make her realise she needs to stop running away and overcome her fear of being alone.

Director’statement

Toledo is my hometown, but I have been living away from there for more than 20 years. I feel that perhaps I have more in common with the poppy nomads than with my own family. I come back temporarily, only to soon wander again aimlessly. I, like them, struggled to feel liberated and so made choices. In which of these lifestyles, the nomadic or the stationary, is it possible to feel more free? How much is at stake in each of them? The pickers come in search of wild opium, but there are also plantations of white poppies for pharmaceutical use. Today, Spain is the world’s largest producer of pharmaceutical opium and third largest consumer of Fentanyl, the opiate that is causing devastation in the United States. Opium, humanity’s first medicine and the cause of major addiction problems globally, exposes a human need to escape pain, of somehow going numb. Alma’s journey is also an escape from pain, an instinctive act of survival to her loneliness. Her journey is the central axis of this film. The camera will never leave her, creating a subjective experience in its most heightened form.

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