Gallivant

Director: Andrew Kotting

Institute History

  • 1997 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Andrew Kotting’s enchanting Gallivant is a rare hybrid of avant-garde travelogue and family adventure movie. In its tender meditation on the frailties and strengths of the human spirit, the film succeeds as a work of both tremendous humor and heart.

Accompanied by his elderly mother Gladys and daughter Eden, who has a learning disability and communicates through sign language, the director embarks on a journey to circumnavigate the coastline of Britain. As the trio roam from cemeteries to coastal towns, Kotting documents the quiet humanism and charming eccentricity of the lives they pass along the way. Throughout their excursion, the lives of the Kottings randomly and momentarily intersect with these unfamiliar countrymen—bunion-impaired tourists, lawn bowlers, nuns, “lollipop ladies,” harmonica players, and fishermen. Against the gorgeous, epic imagery of land and sea emerges a tale of quiet lives lived and cherished moments remembered. Often mischievous but always affectionate, Gallivant portrays the indelible bond between one in her twilight years and someone whose journey has barely begun.

In bearing witness to Kotting’s precious observations, the audience, like the family, cannot but be transformed by the journey. Moving, witty, and more than a little kooky, Gallivant is the work of a passionately inventive filmmaker.

— Rebecca Yeldham

Screening Details

Credits

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