Andrew Kötting's Lek and the Dogs (2017)

 

This is the last of Kötting's Earthworks (or Landworks) trilogy, which also includes This Filthy Earth (2001) and the French-made Ivul (2009), in all three of which French perormance artist and actor Xavier Tchili appears as 'Lek'. This film is based on Hattie Naylor's play Ivan and the Dogs, which itself is based on the true story of the Russian Ivan Mishukov, who as a child left his Moscow home following abuse from his stepfather and his alcoholic mother. He spent two years living  with a pack of dogs which accepted him, although the time Lek spends with the dogs is much longer. With its overvoices by ‘body psychotherapist’, ‘child psychologist’ and ‘animal behaviourist’ it appears very much like a documentary on one of the most terrifying forms of alienation.

There is also something of Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape in this, along with Tarkovsky's film Stalker, although it is in a space of its own. Kötting'x Lek is less adaptable than the non-fictional Ivan, and he leaves his girlfriend Mina and his child to return to the world he knew before. At the end of the film I thought Lek was walking around a dog cemetery, and then a quotation from Eugene O'Neill: 'There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.'