A 6,000-mile journey zig-zagging around the coast of Britain, Gallivant (1996) is both an experimental travelogue and an intensely personal story. Filmmaker Andrew Kötting begins the journey to bring Gladys, his 85-year old grandmother, and Eden, his 7-year old daughter, together. Gladys's stamina is limited, and Eden has Joubert's syndrome: she's not expected to live to adulthood. Both are fragile, and the journey is an opportunity which may not be repeated.

The film follows their journey chronologically, but the film is far from naturalistic. Kötting uses different film and video stocks, timelapse photography, and macro shots. He also inserts found footage and non-synchronous sound. Sometimes this is ironic: tourists looking through pay-per-view telescopes at a cliff's edge 'see' what-the-butler-saw footage. Sometimes it's dramatically beautiful: the tide rapidly sweeping out towards Lindisfarne. Unable to see through Gladys' or Eden's eyes, we see that the journey itself has many viewers, each with their own eyes. Eden can't speak, but uses a limited-vocabulary sign language, and the film subtitles her commentary on the journey.

Kötting looks not for an essential quality of British life, but for its symptoms: folk culture and songs. He cajoles two old men at Port Carlisle into singing 'Do ye ken John Peel?', one accompanying the other on his mouth organ. At Robin Hood's Bay, folk musician Martin Carthy gives a more professional rendering of 'Sailing over the Dogger Bank'. In Goathland, a sword dancer explains the dance's pagan Viking roots, and in Hastings a man tells how the Jack-in-the-Green festival has exploded in popularity.

Some traditions are as bizarre as others are archaic: in Clootywell, old women hang pieces of their clothing from trees in a ritual to combat ailments. But as a man at Whitehaven says, people who live on the coast and people who live inland are different: we might be only seeing the very edges of Britain's folk traditions. The film relies largely on happy accident for its encounters: when Kötting falls off the side of his van, shattering his ankle, the camera follows him even to hospital, where he strikes up a conversation with fellow patients.

The journey ends where it began, in Bexhill-on-Sea, with evidence that Kötting has succeeded in bringing Gladys and Eden closer: the film closes on the two exchanging a hug. The shared experience of discovering Britain's fringes closes a gap of four generations.

This Our Still Life is a portrait of a tumbledown Pyrenean farmhouse as seen through the eyes and ears of the family that have lived there on and off for the last 22 years. With music by Scanner and a plethora of cut-ups and voices from the filmmaker’s sound archive the work explores notions of nostalgia, memory and place. –Venice Film Festival

From 'The Guardian' interview on 'This Our Still Life':

His latest film, This Our Still Life (2011), is a deep excavation of rural living that's less knockabout than anything he has produced before. It's personal without being narcissistic, a home movie that feels anything but hermetic. Just 59 minutes long, it's set in Louyre, the abandoned farmhouse in the Pyrenees to which he moved with Eden and her mother, Leila, in 1989 and where he still spends three months each year.

"It's a fearful place to be," Kötting says. "It's ramshackle and permanently about to fall down. It's built into a mountain. The damp, the rot, the woodworm, the deathwatch beetle: now it's being annihilated by storms and autumnal weather, and soon permafrost. But it's also a safe haven, a hidey hole, a soothing place to be despite the difficulties."

Eden is at the centre of the film. Now 22, she's lived longer than many experts had anticipated when she appeared in Gallivant. She is shown drawing and painting, playing games with her parents, singing "Love Me Tender". Super-8 and digital images of her from across the decades form part of the film: sometimes she looks frail, at other times feisty and joyous. The film wants to freeze time, to preserve Eden: she, like Louyre itself, fights ruination each day.

For Kötting, who says This Our Still Life started out as a lo-fi visual diary assembled for close friends after the difficulties of completing his last feature film, Ivul (2009), the picture is partly defined by Robin Rimbaud's melancholic score: "It's elegiac and classical and sorrowful. When Eden's drawing she's happy and immersed in what she's doing, but for me it's still intolerable. It can drive you fucking mad spending hours in a remote location with a severely disabled young woman. You're trying to make sense of your life and her life and thinking: is this fair?"

How, I ask Kötting, has Eden influenced his artistic vision? "Once she came into my life everything changed. Patience, humility, pain, suffering, my love of endurance: I have Eden to thank for all of this. It's all-consuming.

"Eden's is another way of being. You wake up in the morning and you have to get her out of bed and start motivating her. She wouldn't eat. She wouldn't know how to begin to eat. I am her life-support system. But she's my psyche-support system."