Black Harvest

Black Harvest (1992)

Joe Leahy is the half-caste son of one of the first explorers of the Papua New Guinean interior. The documentary explores his relationship with the tribes that work his coffee plantation and explores what happens when the coffee market situation becomes more difficult.

Date of release
1992-04-04
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (7)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Robin Anderson, Bob Connolly
Collection
The Highlands Trilogy

Interesting facts

  • Box office: A$52.7K

Black Harvest is a 1992 Australian-Papua New Guinea documentary directed by Australians Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson. It is the third film in 'The Highlands Trilogy', concluding the series which includes the 1983 film First Contact and the 1989 film Joe Leahy's Neighbours.

Production and release

After shooting was completed for Joe Leahy's Neighbours, Anderson and Connolly planned to return to witness the wealth eventuating for the Ganiga people. However, in response to the drop in coffee prices, the film was adapted to respond to events as they unfolded, living on location for a year. During this time they had their then two-year-old daughter Katherine accompanying them.

Connolly later in 2005 wrote a book on the shooting of the documentary, called Making ‘Black Harvest’ – Warfare, Filmmaking and Living Dangerously in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The book received a 2005 Walkley Award for best non-fiction book. It was based on notes of the experience Anderson took after losing a coin toss which decided who would take the notes.

The film was screened worldwide in many film festivals, such as the Sundance Film Festival, the Singapore International Film Festival, the Sydney Film Festival, Cinema Du Reel and the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival before going into successful commercial release with its theatrical release. It was broadcast in Australia in 1992 on the ABC.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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