This Our Still Life Directed by Andrew Kötting Starring Andrew Kötting, Leila McMillan, Eden Kotting Released November 18
volving as a series of drawings – now collected in a beautiful book – This Our Still Life offers a beguiling and expansive portrait of ‘Louyre’, the remote tumbledown Pyrenean hidey-hole that filmmaker Andrew Kötting shares with his partner Leila McMillan and their daughter Eden (the ‘star’ of the director’s first feature, seminal British road movie Gallivant). A family of artists for whom creativity flows like blood, life in this part-time rural idyll is elemental, rudimentary, fun and intimate. Filmed over a 20-year period on a Nizo Super 8 and a primitive Samsung digital camera with incidental music from either the radio or Eden’s own CD collection (music composed by Scanner also features), the film explores notions of nostalgia, memory, isolation and love as it offers snatched insights into the minutiae of the Kötting family’s everyday living. Running from season to season, the film also depicts the passage of time and the surrounding
Machine Gun Preacher D i r e c t e d by M a r c Fo r s t e r S t a r r i n g G e r a r d B u t l e r, Michelle Monaghan, Michael Shannon Released November 2
elements, including the local wildlife that encroaches, sometimes threateningly so, on the Kötting’s domesticity. Continuing the director’s playful and experimental approach to the representation of sound and image, This Our Still Life uses cut-ups and sound bites to ensure that this portraiture allows for and invites implied narratives, resisting the easy categorisation of biography or documentary. Spurred into editing the wealth of material following a Christmas 2006 viewing of Stan Brakhage’s Dog Man Star, Kötting describes his most recent creation as being about “who we are and what we do”. Informed by the director’s beloved The Moon and the Sledgehammer and by Gideon Koppel’s more recent Sleep Furiously, the film continues the interest in landscape, family and topography that have driven Gallivant, This Filthy Earth, Ivul and the director’s numerous other non-feature-length forays into the nether regions of the moving image. This is a melancholy
on’t somebody please think of the children?’ isn’t Machine Gun Preacher’s tagline, but considering the film’s crippling lack of nuance or restraint, something that melodramatic would have been entirely fitting. Not that its depiction of a war-torn East Africa, where children are the ones who bear the bloody brunt of warlord Joseph Kony’s sadistic political campaign, is something to be ridiculed. The war in northern Uganda is a topic worthy of in-depth scrutiny and Preacher intelligently finds its way in via the true story of Sam Childers. Going from leather-vest-wearing druggie to born again Christian, Childers (Gerard Butler) embraces his faith and answers a call for help from Uganda, where he gets caught up in the troubles. Portraying Childers with livewire emotion, Butler is fantastic. He’s an unlikely hero whose addictive personality has him dogooding with the same frenzied energy that fuelled his boozy benders. But by focusing so intently on Childers, director Marc Forster does his film a disservice. That’s especially apparent in the casting of Michelle Monaghan and Michael Shannon (as Childers’ wife and buddy respectively), who are given seeds of intriguing subplots that never have a chance to
and ultimately profoundly moving and affecting work. Viewing it is very strongly recommended, whether you’re already part of Kötting’s select but vociferous fan club or not. Jason Wood
Anticipation.
A new film from one of the brightest under-heard voices in contemporary British cinema.
Enjoyment.
A unique and astonishing portrait of people and place.
In Retrospect. I n t r i g u i n g , innovative and undoubtedly o n e o f t h e d i r e c t o r ’s ve r y finest creations. This is a film to cherish.
germinate. Meanwhile, less involving characters get more screen time – including a wise little boy who’s pure cliché. All that could have been forgiven if Preacher’s Uganda segments packed enough wallop. But as the real victims of this conflict emerge in their bloody masses – those defenceless children – Forster all but hammers his message home with a mallet. Repeatedly. Machine Gun Preacher eventually tumbles into unforgivably preachy territory before the film’s final act buckles under the considerable weight of those hard-bitten images. Josh Winning
Anticipation.
Fest buzz hasn’t been great, but Butler looks on good form.
Enjoyment.
Lacking entirely i n s u b t l e t y, P r e a c h e r f i r e s on all cylinders and quickly burns itself out.
In Retrospect. O v e r l y p r e a c h y and overly long. Chalk it as a m i s s e d o p p o r t u n i t y.
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