Andrew Kötting
Andrew Kötting (born 16 December 1959) is a British artist, writer, and filmmaker. He made numerous experimental short films, which were awarded prizes at international film festivals. "Gallivant", was his first feature film, a road/home film about his four-month journey around the coast of the UK, with his grandmother Gladys and his daughter Eden. "Gallivant" won the Channel 4 Prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival for Best Director and the Golden Ribbon Award in Rimini (Italy). In 2011 the film was voted number 49 in Best British Film of all time by "Time Out". Kötting has  frequently collaborated with Iain Sinclair, Jem Finer and his daughter Eden Kötting. He is currently a Professor of Time Based Media at the University for the Creative Arts Canterbury. Early life. Kötting was born in Kent on 16 December 1959. He studied BA Fine Art at the Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in 1984 and MA in Mixed Media at the Slade School of Art in 1988. Life and career. Kötting released "Gallivant", his first feature-length film, in 1996. It premièred at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where it won the Channel 4 Best New Director prize. Kötting released  his second feature, "This Filthy Earth", in 2001. It was loosely adapted from Émile Zola's novel "La Terre". In July 2010, Kötting was an artist-in-residence at the La Rochelle International Film Festival in south-west France, creating work and collaborating with the photographer Sebastian Edge. In 2011 he directed "This Our Still Life", which premièred at the Venice Film Festival and was acquired by the BFI for distribution in the UK and Ireland. Gareth Evans, Curator, Whitechapel Gallery, called Kötting one of Britain's most intriguing artists, currently practising who: could be said to have taken to  heart the spirit of visionary curiosity and hybrid creativity exemplified by the late Derek Jarman. His forty year oeuvre to date has moved from early live-art inflected, often absurdist pieces, through darkly comic shorts teasing out the melancholy surrealism at the heart of contemporary Englishness to nine resolutely independent feature films that take landscape and journeys as the springboards for visually striking and structurally inventive enquiries into identity, belonging, history and notions of community. It is his openness and outlaw intelligence and compelling wit that marks out his work as both vital and important."