By Our Selves

Andrew Kötting re-teams with writer and "psychogeographer" Iain Sinclair, with whom he travelled the Thames in a swan-shaped pedalo in 2012's Swandown, for this engagingly loopy meditation on the work of 19th-century British poet John Clare. In 1841 a penniless Clare absconded from the asylum in which he had been confined and walked 80 miles from Epping Forest to Northamptonshire. Kötting and Sinclair re-create the walk, with Sinclair interviewing people along the way, while Toby Jones plays the poet as he wanders through the modern and forest landscapes in which the past collides with the present. Inevitably some of Kötting's experiments fail to come off - the uncertain use of a camera drone at times gives the unfortunate impression that Clare is being chased through Epping Forest by a demonic leaf blower. But others, particularly the multilayered sound design, contribute to a mesmerising and surprisingly moving film; one which continues to cement Kötting as a fascinating avant-garde British film-maker in the tradition of Derek Jarman or Peter Greenaway.