Andrew Kötting (born on 16 December 1959) is a British film director, writer and artist.
Kötting was born in Kent. He studied BA Fine Art at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, London, 1984; MA in Mixed Media, Slade School of Art, London 1988. 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.
One of his first attempts at filmmaking, according to a Premiere profile, "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, often produced via the London Film-Makers Co-op.
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. The growing closeness between these two and the sense of impending mortality give the film its emotional underpinning. 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, the film 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". 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. "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."
Most recently Kötting has returned to working within the gallery context see his In the Wake of a Deadad . www.deadad.info a piece of work which led to his being shortlisted for the Derek Jarman Award 2008.
His most recent film is Ivul, screened at the 53rd London Film Festival in 2009, is set in Switzerland and the Pyrenees. Alex Ivul (Jacob Auzanneau) is the boy in a family of three sisters, a Russian father (Jean-Luc Bideau) and mother (Aurelia Petit). Alex is close elder sis Freya (Adelaide Leroux), who is about to leave for Russia. They play taboo games before she leave and when his father finds out he banishes him to the trees by declaring that he should not set foot on the floor again. Alex takes this command literally. In very brief terms, the core themes examine family relationships and his father's dynamic. [1] The film was released through Artificial Eye in June 2010.[2]
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.
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Matheou, Demetrios, 'Profile, Andrew Kötting', Premiere, Oct. 1997, p. 13 Calhoun, David, 'Britain as you've never seen it before', Observer (Review section), 14 Oct. 2000, pp. 8–9 Calhoun, Dave, 'Up to his neck in mud and blood', Independent on Sunday (Culture section), 8 Dec. 2000, p. 2 Kötting, Andrew, 'It's a Dirty Job', Guardian (Section 2), 2 Nov. 2001, pp. 10–11