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Lek And The Dogs

+ Director’s Q&A

Showing times:

• Tue 10 Jul: 7pm

Dir. Andrew Kötting, 2017, UK, 92 mins

Experimental artist and auteur Andrew Kötting creates a groundbreaking crossover between narrative film and contemporary art piece, based on the award-winning play by Hattie Naylor. The film is inspired by the true story of Ivan Mishukov, who walked out of his apartment at the age of four and spent two years living on the city streets where he was adopted by a pack of wild dogs. In a recession-ravaged city, the child’s world was dominated by deprivation and violence; his only hope was to turn to feral dogs for company, protection and warmth.

Kötting’s spellbinding and utterly original story of survival draws on a range of innovative techniques, including home movies and archive to produce a montage essay on the state of the world. Lek, played by the French performance artist and actor Xavier Tchili and who starred in Köttings two earlier feature films, This Filthy Earth and IVUL returns with a mesmerising performance of a man close to the edge, buried under the weight of his own existential terrors. With trace elements of Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape the film sends the protagonist, Lek into a zone deep underground only to see him surface in the deserts of northern Chile.

Ultimately the film inhabits a foggy no-man’s land between documentary and fiction, essay and narrative whilst at the same time probing for answers to the universal questions of Where now? Who now? When now?

Please be aware that for this screening we will not be showing adverts before feature; please arrive promptly for the film start time.

POST-SCREENING Q&A

The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the film’s director, Andrew Kötting.

Andrew Kötting was born in Elmstead Woods in 1959. After some early forays into market trading and scrap-metal dealing he travelled to Scandinavia to become a Lumberjack. He returned home in the 80’s to study for a BA Honours Degree in Fine Art at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design and then graduated with a Masters Degree from The Slade, University College, London.

He currently lives and works between Hastings in England and Fougax-et-Barrineuf in the forests of the French Pyrenees. He teaches part-time at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury where he is Professor of Time Based Media. He has made numerous experimental short and feature films, which were awarded prizes at international film festivals.

Gallivant (1996), was his first feature film, a road movie about his three-month journey around the coast of Britain, with his grandmother Gladys and his daughter Eden. The film won the Channel 4 Prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival for Best Director and the Golden Ribbon Award in Rimini (Italy) and in 2011 was voted number 49 as Best British Film of all time by the UK publication Time Out.

2016 saw a 6 week retrospective of his films at Cinema Nova in Brussels as well as the release of two short animated films made in collaboration with his daughter Eden. Andrew has also worked with Iain Sinclair on three multimedia art projects: Swandown, by our selves and Edith Walks, which were presented in cinemas and galleries across the UK and as a journeyworks triptych installation at towner, Eastbourne in 2017.

???? ‘Affecting in unpredictable ways’
THE OBSERVER

Venue: Studio 74, Exeter Phoenix