Swandown
Short film Completed 2012
Director & Writer
Andrew Kotting
Doc Society helped with
Production
Runtime: 94 minutes
Swandown is a poetic film-diary about encounter and culture. It is also an endurance test and pedal-marathon. Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair pedalled a plastic swan-shaped pedalo from Hastings to Hackney in East London, via English inland waterways. Andrew’s daughter Eden joined the journey, along with invited guests, including Stewart Lee, Alan Moore, Marcia Farquhar and Dudley Sutton.
The action may in part be seen as an act of ‘dada performance’ or as a response to the spirit of Olympic diversity and ambition. The journey and all that it entails are documented on both film and video and will be presented as a 90-minute feature length experimental documentary.
Crew
Andrew Kotting
Director & Writer
Andrew Kötting is a British film director, writer and artist. Kötting was born in Kent. He studied Fine Art at Ravensbourne College of Art and Mixed Media at the Slade School of Art. In 1989 he collaborated with Leila McMillan in setting up BadBLoOd & siBYL studios in the French Pyrenees. He is currently a teaching Professor in Video Arts Production at the University for the Creative Arts.
Previous films:
One of his first attempts at filmmaking involved inserting iron filings in the shape of religious icons into his penis and then drawing them out again. For his degree film, a short called Klipperty Klop (1986), Kötting ran round and round a Gloucestershire field pretending to ride a horse. Over the next ten years, Kötting directed a number of experimental shorts.
Kötting’s first feature-length movie was Gallivant (1996). A “highly idiosyncratic” documentary, it records a journey the director took clockwise around the coast of Britain accompanied by his 85-year-old grandmother, Gladys, and his seven-year-old daughter Eden. Eden was born at Guy’s Hospital, London, in 1988 with a rare genetic disorder – Joubert syndrome – causing cerebral vermis hypoplasia and several other neurological complications. Gallivant was premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where it won the Channel 4 Best New Director prize.
Kötting’s second feature, This Filthy Earth (2001), was loosely adapted from Émile Zola’s novel La Terre. Since then he has completed Mapping Perception (2002), a short ‘science, film and art project’ inspired by his daughter Eden. Kötting still sees himself as essentially a performance artist. His piece In the Wake of a Deadad (http://www.deadad.info) led to his being shortlisted for the Derek Jarman Award in 2008. His film Ivul, was screened at the 53rd London Film Festival in 2009 and was released through Artificial Eye in June 2010.
In July 2010, Kötting was one of two directors in residence at the La Rochelle International Film Festival in South West France, creating work and collaborating with the photographer artist Sebastian Edge, using his self-built camera in the 19th Century process and his Darkvan, a Transit van Sebastian converted into a mobile darkroom. His film Louyre – This Our Still Life has been selected for the Orrizonti section at the 2011 Venice Film Festival.
