“Just watched LEK AND THE DOGS and thought (not for the first time) thank heavens for Andrew Kotting! From Filthy Earth to Edith Walks, no-one else makes films like this.” @KermodeMovie
The third part in director Andrew Kötting’s Earth trilogy, Lek and the Dogs allows us the opportunity of revisit both This Filthy Earth and Ivul, the earlier films in the cycle. Taking place on, above and below the earth, as a whole the trilogy offers an experimental mediation on human existence.
“This Filthy Earth grew out of the unexpected success, the welcome given to Gallivant – but it was a fresh start, the beginning of another way of working. Ground, Off-ground, Underground. Or, better: Land, Off-land, Underland. Being up to the armpits in mud, drowning in it for This Filthy Earth demands release, flight among the trees. After the mysterious, quasi-religious ending of Ivul – cleansing fire, the purged figure, a reincarnated Cathar on Montsegur – it was necessary to go into resonant darkness, under the land for Lek And The Dogs. Kötting is always operating on stolen time, veins popping – dictate new paths and new places. A cave in France becomes a Russian bunker. La Terre relocates from the Beauce to Dentdale in Yorkshire as surrogate Filthy Earth. The whole series is polyglot, borderless, inspired by the director’s own life in the Pyrenees and borrowed Tarkovsky dreams of Russian dystopias and underworlds.
The second feature from the director of the wonderful Gallivant, This Filthy Earth is inspired by Zola’s novel The Earth. The director and the co-writer, comedian Sean Lock, have transposed the original French setting to an isolated farm in North Yorkshire. There young sisters Francine and Kath work their inherited, harsh land. Two men – a local brute who wants to grab the land and the other a gentle stranger – will threaten the closeness of the siblings’bond. With its striking mix of film formats and DV, the film mixes black humour with a raw depiction of rural hardship.”
– Iain Sinclair, 2018
Previously in this season
Cinema
Lek And The Dogs
Experimental artist and auteur Andrew Kötting creates a ground-breaking crossover between narrative film and contemporary art piece, based on the award-winning play by Hattie Naylor.