Ivul

Man and nature tend to rub up against each other in odd ways in the films of Andrew Kötting, a British artist whose many projects extend to short films, installations and collaborations with the likes of musician Jem Finer and writer Iain Sinclair. This is Kötting’s third feature after ‘Gallivant’ and ‘This Filthy Earth’, his first in French (a quirk of funding) and perhaps his most conventional, at least in terms of its look. On paper, ‘Ivul’ sounds like melodrama: a teenage boy, Alex (Jacob Auzanneau), abandons his family’s isolated rural home to live in the trees after his father suspects him of fiddling with his sister of a similar age. But the textures of the film prove more interesting than the facts, which are little more than a canvas for Kötting’s more esoteric visual and sonic explorations: he inserts archive footage, employs time-lapse photography and adopts an entrancing mix of music and other sounds to explore the feelings and behaviours that emerge from his tale of teenage lust and isolation. It may lack some of the earthy kick of his previous two films, but ‘Ivul’ still shows Kötting as an outsider force to be reckoned with.