Director Andrew Kötting started his filmmaking career as a Ravensbourne art student, directing a number of experimental shorts. His first feature was Gallivant (1996), a documentary following a journey clockwise around the coast of Britain accompanied by his 85-year-old grandmother and his 7-year-old daughter. It premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where it won the Channel 4 Best New Director prize. Since then, Kötting’s work has moved between short films, fiction features, documentary, and gallery installation, including the 2012 collaboration with writer Iain Sinclair, Swandown. 

Kötting’s rarely screened second feature, This Filthy Earth (2001), screening tonight, was loosely adapted from Ãmile Zola’s novel La Terre, and is set in a rural community somewhere and sometime in the north of England. Kötting summed up his aim as “trying to show the landscape in its full beauty and brutality”, and is perfect for Down on the Farm’s opening night screening. Co-funded by the UK Film Council and Film Four, the film tells of the tragic story of two sisters whose lives are disrupted amidst a landscape of rural hardship and a community consumed with superstition, threatening their sibling bond.

Kötting still sees himself as essentially a performance artist. “Even to this day,” he says, “I wouldn’t think of myself as a feature film-maker. I’m just making longer pieces of work.” 

Andrew Kötting will talk about his experiences and varied career, moving between genres and practises, and give an insight into the work of one of the UK’s most unique and essential filmmakers.