HASTINGS' OWN
Andrew Kötting Weekend: A Selection of Award-winning Short Films + Director's Intro & Q&A
Award-winning short films from Hastings experimental filmmaker Andrew Kotting, hosted by Nicholas Johnson.
Director: ANDREW KOTTING
Cast includes: VARIOUS
HOSTED BY NICholas JOHNSON
Electric Palace is delighted to present our Andrew Kötting Weekend, a celebration of films by the internationally recognised filmmaker and artist.
His career started with early live-art, often absurdist pieces, through darkly comic shorts teasing out the melancholy surrealism at the heart of contemporary Englishness to eight resolutely independent feature films that take biography, landscape and journeys as springboards into the making of visually striking and structurally inventive enquiries into identity, belonging, history and notions of the folkloric.
We will kick-start the weekend festival with a selection of award-winning short films followed by a director's Q and A, hosted by writer, Nicholas Johnson:
SMART ALEK – 1993 – 20 minutes
Andrew Kötting (Gallivant, Swandown) Sean Lock (pre Comedy Genius) inject real terror into the everyday nightmare of a family vacation in this sharp, shocking short.
LA BAS - 1994 – 18 minutes
Taking as its departure point the 1993 opening of the Channel Tunnel and filmed in Bexhill this prize winning film is a playful burlesque on cultural difference, eccentricity and passion.
JAUNT 1995 – 1995 – 4 minutes
A trip up the river Thames and test bed for Gallivant
INTERMISSION
THE SUN CAME DRIPPING A BUCKET FULL OF GOLD – 2014 - 5 minutes. An early collaboration with Eden shot on the beach at St Leonards - on - sea
THEIR RANCID WORDS STAGNATE OUR PONDS - 2018 – 8 minutes. Shot in the Atacama Desert, Chile.
DISEASED AND DISORDERLY – 2021 - 12 minutes
Made in collaboration with Eden and local artist Glenn Whiting.
HOPE HOLDS UP HER HEAD AND HOPES – 2025 - 10 minutes
Shot at the Silent Valley Reservoir in Northern Ireland.
Andrew Kötting. Born between the mountains and the sea 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, London.
He currently lives and works between Hastings in England and Fougax-et-Barrineuf in the French Pyrenees. He teaches part-time at the University for the Creative Arts where he is Professor of Time Based Media.
He has made numerous experimental short films, which were awarded prizes at international film festivals. Gallivant (1996), was his first feature film, a road/home movie about his four-month journey around the coast of Britain, with his grandmother Gladys and his daughter Eden, which won the Channel 4 Prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival for Best Director and the Golden Ribbon Award in Rimini (Italy). The film went on in 2011 to be voted number 49 as Best British Film of all time by the UK publication Time Out.
Nicholas Johnson was drawn to Hastings by a Projection Space session at the Electric Palace in 2008. He hasn’t left since. Along the way he ran Black Huts festival, unifying music writing and film, often in the same sessions. Now he’s nearly finished writing Anomie, an exploration of the life and work of Scots film artist Bill Douglas and three farms in the county that became Douglas’ second home - of Devon. Within this book lie conversations with film makers including Ben Rivers, Andrew Kötting, John Furse, and those who Douglas knew, encouraged and worked with, like Aisling Walsh and Kevin Brownlow.
Hastings Own, shines a light on home-grown talent from Hastings and East Sussex. We thank Andrew Kötting and his collaborators for supporting the Electric Palace.
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