Award winning film maker makes appearance in Hastings this weekend

It takes place at 7pm at the Kino Teatr, Norman Road, St Leonards.

Andrew directed the 2017 film Edith Walks, which featured Iain Sinclair and imagines a journey by Edith the Fair, wife of King Harold, from Waltham Abbey, where he is buried, to the site of the Battle of Hastings and on to the statue of of Harold and Edith on St Leonards seafront.

The pair will be discussing their work and collaborations during the event called Lifeworks. It will conclude with a Q&A.

Kötting has more than earned his place as the most radical film maker we currently have. Like his oft time collaborator, the writer Iain Sinclair, he has a mad, fevered, insightful eye, an energy that hits like a derailed train. His next direction always unguessable. His work is transformative, always made from the ground up, offering new angles and insights.

The Edith Walks film eschews school boy history, Northern monologues and heritage cash generators, descending to the root of bloody reality. Edith Swan Neck dredging the battlefield, only able to recognise the mutilated corpse of her hand-fasted husband by certain ’intimate’ marks – earning his burial rites at Waltham Abbey.

The evening promises to be a collision of what, for my money, is the best living English writer and film maker.

Together they give the past a howling, disjointed voice, peer deep into overlooked and abandoned spaces. Their combined work is transformative, a quest for long buried, unobtainable grails. The entire output is a provocation. They succeed in re-energising the past, bringing it precariously back to life like Lovecraft’s Herbert West.

Drunk on an excess of landscape and miles, they stagger on, foot foundered but rarely making a mis-step. Their combined work is defined by movement, kinetic energy, possessed by roads and rivers.

As Sinclair notes: ‘Maps are lies, signposts mock’. We are thrown headlong into a hazy miasma of outlaying territories.

The pair are outriders of history, visionary polymaths cut from the same cloth as Dr John Dee – two road refugees at the peak of their power.

Saturday’s word and vision seance at the Kino will be organic, mad and essential.

Have you read? Sadness over loss of 1,000 year old yew tree at Battle.

Have you read? Hastings Banksy mural obscured by graffiti