By Our Selves
classified 15Please note: This was screened in Oct 2015
Following their successful collaboration on Swandown (2011), director Andrew Kötting and writer Iain Sinclair reunite to document 19th century poet John Clare's journey on foot from Epping Forest up into Northamptonshire.
The poet John Clare was a consummate outsider in the Romantic age - a working-class rural poet with a history of mental illness. The central event in his biography was his escape from an Essex asylum and the subsequent four-day walk to Northamptonshire in search of Mary, his first great love. Now, exactly 150 years after his death, actor Toby Jones, writer Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting (as a Straw Bear!) follow in Clare’s footsteps.
Captured in lustrous black and white photography, this epic march through hunger and madness acts like a prism for a lost soul in a constrained world, and sees our intrepid travellers discover the only truth of the road; Whatever our hopes and delusions, we are always By Our Selves.