An estranged young woman returns to her flooded Somerset home in this haunting family drama
The flat, flooded plains of Somerset provide fertile soil for writer/director Hope Dickson Leach in this remarkably powerful tale of blighted farms and fractured families. Fulfilling the promise of such acclaimed shorts as The Dawn Chorus and Morning Echo, her quietly overwhelming feature debut addresses grand upheavals (personal, regional, economic) in deceptively understated and fiercely truthful fashion. Focusing on an estranged daughter’s return to her low-lying Levels home in the wake of a family tragedy, Dickson Leach conjures a postdiluvian rural Britain in which secrets, like bodies, refuse to stay buried. The director may cite the Dardenne brothers, Bruno Dumont and Kelly Reichardt as key influences, but it’s the robust heft of Andrew Kötting’s This Filthy Earth that sprang to mind as I waded into this emotional field a second time,...
The flat, flooded plains of Somerset provide fertile soil for writer/director Hope Dickson Leach in this remarkably powerful tale of blighted farms and fractured families. Fulfilling the promise of such acclaimed shorts as The Dawn Chorus and Morning Echo, her quietly overwhelming feature debut addresses grand upheavals (personal, regional, economic) in deceptively understated and fiercely truthful fashion. Focusing on an estranged daughter’s return to her low-lying Levels home in the wake of a family tragedy, Dickson Leach conjures a postdiluvian rural Britain in which secrets, like bodies, refuse to stay buried. The director may cite the Dardenne brothers, Bruno Dumont and Kelly Reichardt as key influences, but it’s the robust heft of Andrew Kötting’s This Filthy Earth that sprang to mind as I waded into this emotional field a second time,...
- 5/14/2017
- by Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
- The Guardian - Film News
The Awakening; Take Shelter; Wuthering Heights; 50/50; Tower Heist; Puss in Boots; Happy Feet Two; The Thing
One unexpected side effect of the attritional gore war waged by seemingly endless Saw and Hostel sequels has been the rise of more subtle ghostly chillers whose old-fashioned charms are in stark contrast to the shrieking white noise of modern torture-porn tedium. With the 12-rated haunted-house throwback movie The Woman in Black still making a killing at the UK box office, Nick Murphy's similarly spirited The Awakening (2011, StudioCanal, 15) offers home viewers a few creepy tingles in the vein of (though not of the same calibre as) The Orphanage and The Others.
At the centre of its efficiently executed spell is Rebecca Hall, whose expertly nuanced performance raises this above the level of the humdrum. She plays Florence Cathcart, a sceptical investigator with a penchant for debunking claims of paranormal activity in the ghostly...
One unexpected side effect of the attritional gore war waged by seemingly endless Saw and Hostel sequels has been the rise of more subtle ghostly chillers whose old-fashioned charms are in stark contrast to the shrieking white noise of modern torture-porn tedium. With the 12-rated haunted-house throwback movie The Woman in Black still making a killing at the UK box office, Nick Murphy's similarly spirited The Awakening (2011, StudioCanal, 15) offers home viewers a few creepy tingles in the vein of (though not of the same calibre as) The Orphanage and The Others.
At the centre of its efficiently executed spell is Rebecca Hall, whose expertly nuanced performance raises this above the level of the humdrum. She plays Florence Cathcart, a sceptical investigator with a penchant for debunking claims of paranormal activity in the ghostly...
- 3/25/2012
- by Mark Kermode
- The Guardian - Film News
Fifty-one-year-old British painter, performance artist and film-maker Andrew Kötting is best known for an eccentric documentary, Gallivant (1996), about his trip around the coast of Britain with his elderly grandmother and his seven-year-old daughter Eden, a sufferer from Joubert syndrome, a rare condition that affects sight, movement and speech. He's also made This Filthy Earth (2001), a curious transposition of Zola's La Terre to northern England. His latest film, This Our Still Life, is a film poem, collage or meditation about the old remote farmhouse in the Pyrenees in which he and his family have lived off and on since 1989. It's a highly personal, often obscure picture, structured around the four seasons, with poignant images, speeches on the soundtrack and a superimposed, somewhat portentous text in caps. Eden, now 23, figures prominently and is an endearing presence. It's been chosen as the film of the month in December's Sight & Sound, where Iain Sinclair,...
- 11/20/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
"After a period in which versions of Austen hogged our screens, the Brontës have fought back," writes Boyd Tonkin in a piece for the Independent that begins, by the way, with a brief but rousing history of Charlotte's detestation of Jane Austen. "Released today, Andrea Arnold's savagely uncompromising Wuthering Heights joins a line of adaptations of Emily's only surviving novel that began in 1920 (a lost work by Av Bramble) and went on to include renderings from directors as varied as William Wyler — with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon still the ranking Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw to many fans — and Yoshishige Yoshida, Luis Buñuel and Jacques Rivette. Earlier this year, Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska as the uncowed governess and Michael Fassbender the sulphurous Mr Rochester, offered a rather smoother ride through another much-adapted book, albeit one that shares with Arnold — and the Brontës — a rapt attention...
- 11/13/2011
- MUBI
Following Gallivant, his curious documentary about a journey around the English coast with his mother and handicapped daughter, and This Filthy Earth, a puzzling English rural tragedy inspired by Emile Zola's The Earth, the maverick British filmmaker Andrew Kötting's new film is made in France and in French, apparently for budgetary reasons. It's an uneasy, whimsical tale about the dysfunctional household of an elderly Russian émigré living in the Pyrenees with his faithful old Russian servant (a figure out of Chekhov who also appears in This Filthy Earth), his youngish French wife and their four children. One day he discovers his daughter engaged in what appears to him to be inappropriate sexual conduct with her teenage brother. He angrily throws the boy out of the house, whereupon the lad takes to the trees vowing never to touch the ground again, and the family falls apart. It's an allegory of sorts,...
- 7/24/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Year: 2009
Directors: Andrew Kotting
Writers: Andrew Kotting & John Cheetham
IMDb: link
Trailer: link
Review by: Linus de Paoli
Rating: 3 out of 10
This film of the "Filmmakers of the Present Competition" was hard to sit through, not knowing what to expect> I just knew that the director, Andrew Kötting, was a well-known video- and performance artist from England. "Ivul" is inspired by Kötting's own childhood, when he used to hide up in the trees due to his difficult relationship with his father. The poster might give the impression that is a comedy – it is not. There are some absurd formalistic ideas, but if you are looking for an entertaining collection of curiosities like "The Royal Tenenbaums", this is not the right movie for you.
The story takes place at an old manor house in the French countryside. Far from any big cities, it is surrounded by a mysterious forest. Although the...
Directors: Andrew Kotting
Writers: Andrew Kotting & John Cheetham
IMDb: link
Trailer: link
Review by: Linus de Paoli
Rating: 3 out of 10
This film of the "Filmmakers of the Present Competition" was hard to sit through, not knowing what to expect> I just knew that the director, Andrew Kötting, was a well-known video- and performance artist from England. "Ivul" is inspired by Kötting's own childhood, when he used to hide up in the trees due to his difficult relationship with his father. The poster might give the impression that is a comedy – it is not. There are some absurd formalistic ideas, but if you are looking for an entertaining collection of curiosities like "The Royal Tenenbaums", this is not the right movie for you.
The story takes place at an old manor house in the French countryside. Far from any big cities, it is surrounded by a mysterious forest. Although the...
- 8/17/2009
- QuietEarth.us
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