Ivul

"Brit eccentric Andrew Kötting returns with a French rural drama - a young man takes to the trees when he falls foul of the family patriarch. Filmmaker, artist and wild man of British cinema Andrew Kötting makes his long-awaited third fiction feature Ivul, and in so doing joins the current art-cinema diaspora which has seen many of the UK's left-field filmmakers (eg Peter Strickland, Ben Hopkins, Thomas Clay) working under foreign flags. Here, Kötting reinvents himself – in French – as a Franco-Swiss filmmaker with this intimate and eccentric family story. Alex (Jacob Auzanneau) and his older sister Freya (Adélaïde Leroux) are teenage scions of the dynasty of an émigré Russian patriarch (veteran French actor Jean-Luc Bideau). When the pair are caught playing taboo games, Ivul père is furious, and tells his son never to set foot on his land again – an order the boy follows literally, taking to the trees and living a life off ground. Absolutely convincing as a French film in the 'intimist' vein, Ivul is at the same time 100% Kötting – a story mixing English ruralism and French family narrative with performance art (Alex's tree-clambering feats) and the kind of visual and sonic mixing familiar from the director's Gallivant and This Filthy Earth. Ivul sees Kötting developing a bold but tender new variant on his idiosyncratic outsider aesthetic." Quoting Jonathan Romney