The Memory Blocks Hastings Première + Cast and Crew Q&A

Andrew Kötting’s complex docu-essay about his daughter Eden, who has Joubert syndrome, steps outside conventional filmmaking grammar.

The Memory Blocks takes the viewer on a wild visual journey, using a neurodivergent perspective that reveals how memories shift and transform, challenging our understanding of how we recall and process past experiences.

This gala screening celebrates the Hastings premiere of Kotting's newest feature and is part of our weekend celebration of films by the internationally recognised filmmaker and artist.

His twenty-eight year career has moved from early live-art, often absurdist pieces, through darkly comic shorts teasing out the melancholy surrealism at the heart of contemporary Englishness to eight 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.

Premiering at the Edinburgh Film Festival to acclaim in 2025, this visually unique film sees Kötting working again with his daughter Eden.

Eden and her colleagues from the Project Artworks collective – Charlie, Michelle and Neville – take us on a journey, ferrying fragments of meaning back and forth, stitching time into a visionary experimental feature while having a right laugh along the way.

"These unselfconscious performances or enactments might be bringing us close to an understanding of what Eden thinks and feels – but maybe that isn’t the point and perhaps Eden, or those close to her, have no great need for this kind of insight and the object is more a kind of quietist harmony. Either way, the calmly purposeful originality of Kötting’s work is valuable. Peter Bradshaw
**** The Guardian

Those in costume get FREE complimentary ticket for EP screening.

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.

Hastings' Own shines a light on home-grown talent from Hastings and East Sussex. We thank Andrew Kotting and his collaborators for supporting the Electric Palace.

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