About Lek and the Dogs

Screening at Sydney Film Festival as part of the FLUX: ART+FILM program strand, curated by Bridget Ikin, Lek and the Dogs is a mesmerising narrative film meets art piece by British experimental artistAndrew Kötting. Inspired by the true story of a four-year-old who lived with wild dogs in Moscow.

Adapted from the award-winning play by Hattie Naylor, Lek and the Dogs is a wildly original film. In ravaged and poverty stricken Moscow, four year old Ivan Mishukov walked out of his apartment. The child spent two years living on the streets with a pack of feral dogs, who offered him warmth, tenderness and protection. Using various innovative and experimental techniques – including cassette tapes recorded during that time - it’s a compelling portrait of a wounded child in a nihilistic world, and the contradictions of love.

About Andrew Kötting
Artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting has directed numerous, resolutely independent, short films and feature films, and performed across the UK and Europe. He’s been awarded prizes at international film festivals and won many commissions. He also produces books, CDs, LPs and paintings, many in collaboration with his daughter Eden. He teaches part-time as a Professor of Time Based Media at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury.

Andrew Kötting is one of Britain’s most intriguing artists, and perhaps the only film-maker 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. Formally exploratory and aesthetically innovative, like Jarman he is also a great collaborator, building around his various projects a community of sharedinterest, while anchoring his prolific production in an ongoing report on the lives of those closest to him."
- Gareth Evans, curator, critic and cultural commentator.