Swandown (Film)

"...the indulgent record of a gloriously daft journey the film-maker took in the company of author Iain Sinclair. They travel from Hastings beach to Hackney, round the coast and then north and east, via various circuitous waterways — in a pedalo shaped like a swan" Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian.

Swandown is a travelogue and odyssey of Olympian ambition; a poetic film-diary about encounter, myth and culture. It is also an endurance test and pedal-marathon in which Andrew Kötting (the filmmaker) and Iain Sinclair (the writer) pedal a swan-shaped pedalo from the seaside in Hastings to Hackney in London, via the English inland waterways. With a nod to Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and a pinch of Dada, Swandown documents their epic journey, on which they are joined by invited guests including comedian Stewart Lee, writer Alan Moore and actor Dudley Sutton.

Reviews

It’s a calm, resigned, mystical work that sits back and lets the world work its strange magic on us. 4/5 Time Out, London

Andrew Kötting’s Swandown is a puckish, gently abstract, playfully absurd travelogue. 4/5 The Telegraph

Swandown is utterly funny, deeply lyrical, wholly winning, unchallengeably unique. 5/5 The Financial Times

An engagingly eccentric aquatic odyssey. Screen International

Kötting and Sinclair make for fine shipmates. 4/5 Little White Lies