Misho Antadze’s documentary is about Bitcoin mining in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, which has emerged as the operation’s second most active country in the world, behind only China. But it disdains to explain in detail what the cryptocurrency is, or precisely how the process of mining it actually works, apart from vague generalizations about computers and algorithms and reference to the profits that can be made.
(A caption near the start simply informs us that “Georgia is the second largest exporter of Bitcoins in the world,” adding, “Computers across the region convert time and energy into virtual currency, by solving mathematical problems.”)
Indeed, the most extended dialogue in the film comes at the very beginning, when a television screen is filmed for several minutes as a feminized robot attending an international conference in the capital of Tbilisi congratulates the country’s population on its embrace of modern technology.
Otherwise, The Harvest is composed of a long impressionistic montage, shot in the eastern rural region of Kakheti, in which scenes of residents overseeing single computers or huge banks of them, and tending to the electrical grid that keeps them all running, are juxtaposed with others showing people engaged in the more bucolic activities characteristic of an older era (beekeeping, tending to fields and vineyards, watching over herds of cows and sheep).
Interspersed are brief sequences of the younger generation enjoying the fruits of modern technology—playing video games, flying drones, keeping an eye on the cellphones reporting Bitcoin transactions even as they engage in a nighttime game of soccer made possible by a lighted field.
The contrast is clearly between the old and the new, between the poverty that marked the country in previous times when power outages were daily occurrences (though nostalgia for the past persists in some families—on the wall of one house an official portrait of Stalin, a native of Georgia, is still prominently displayed) and the dreams of prosperity that Bitcoin mining represents.
The film ends with a wordless sequence of a small child idly tapping away on a machine on the floor of a nearly empty room—signifying, perhaps, the residents of a still-backward country trying, however haltingly, to use technology to move to a higher level. The Harvest contains some striking images, but its narrative opaqueness is likely to leave the viewer more frustrated than enlightened. Not a necessary purchase. Aud: C, P.