As part of this year’s Open City Documentary Festival (5-10 September), we will be presenting a collection of events around artists/filmmakers John Smith and Andrew Kötting.
The programme John Smith: Lost in Leytonstone is characteristic of Smith’s formal ingenuity, anarchic wit and oblique narratives, creating mysterious and sometimes fantastical scenarios from documentary records of everyday life. His work is usually triggered by personal experiences, often occurring in or around his east London domestic environment. The films in this programme all focus on the built environment and were made between 1985 and 1996, while Smith was living in short-life housing in Leytonstone.
The industry event John Smith: Give Chance a Chance invites John Smith to talk about how he first became fascinated by the potential of chance and how he incorporates it as an integral part of his working process.The event will be illustrated by a number of his short films, starting with The Girl Chewing Gum.
Pump follows filmmakers Joseph David and Andrew Kötting on a seven-day voyage across an 11 mile stretch of disused monorail in Northern France. Standing eight meters above the ground this concrete viaduct is a relic of the Aérotrain test track: an ambitious project developed in the late 1960s for a nationwide high-speed hovertrain service, which was eventually abandoned due to lack of funds. They travel in a homemade pump trolley, affectionately nicknamed Albertine, and move at an average speed of 2 mph. Folly or quest? Either way, there is no discernable reason for this undertaking, but the challenge of this Dadaist road movie speaks for itself. http://bit.ly/2uYc2gE
Kötting will also be exploring his filmography as part of our Kötting’s Köllaborators & Könfabulators event at the Bargehouse, our festival hub this year http://bit.ly/2x12H9u
