Dir: Andrew Kotting. UK. 2001. 111mins

Andrew Kotting's follow up to his quirky, much admired road movie documentary Gallivant offers an extreme vision of rural hardship. Inspired by Emile Zola's La Terre (Earth), it saturates the screen with mud and muck, blood and viscera to create an unrelenting portrait of squalor, misery and deprivation. Told with an admirable lack of compromise, it also appears to have been created without any concept of attracting an audience. Fans of Kotting's previous work and admirers of iconoclastic experimentation will constitute the potential market for a desperately hard sell even in the specialist arena. Further festival exposure seems a more realistic expectation than theatrical sales.

Described by the director as " a new ad-hoc psychotic cinema" combining fact and fiction, the naturalistic and the stylised, the normal and the berserk, This Filthy Earth certainly lives up to its advance billing. In the opening moments, a child plays in the mud and runs screaming towards the camera. Soon, a woman has her hands drenched in sperm as she helps a bull mount a cow. Unsentimental, unflinching and brutal, this is a rural England where people are inextricably tied to the land and at the mercy of the elements. Anticipation of social realist misery is soon knocked off the agenda however by an approach that establishes its own peculiar style of arthouse delirium.

The story's main focus is on two sisters who eke a living from a remote farm and try to maintain a dignified distance from the rough and tumble of the local community. Although almost psychotically independent, Francine (Palmer) finds herself attracted to tall, handsome stranger Lek (Tchili) who has become a familiar face in the neighbourhood. Kath (Randall) eagerly agrees to marry Buto (Attwooll) despite the fact that he seems more motivated by a desire for her land than a hunger for romance. He also seems to consider Kath a part of the bargain, a fact she finds repellent.

As tensions grate and discontent grows, the subsequent harvest is accompanied by torrential rains that wash away any last vestige of hope. The harvest is lost, rivers burst their banks, livelihoods are threatened and tragedy brings out the worst in a superstitious community looking for someone to blame for their fate. Already fairly overwrought, the tale goes into overdrive with doom and death as inevitable as the changing of the seasons.

As if the story itself wasn't melodramatic enough, Kotting pushes events even further with topsy turvy camera angles, time lapse photography and extreme close-ups used to maintain the assault on the senses and prevent any possibility of viewer complacency. Rustic characters are as grotesque as a set of Fellini extras and as lusty as Pasolini yokels. Every gnarled feature, grubby fingernail and bodily function is lingered over with relish. It isn't enough that a cow dies, we have to witness it being disembowelled. Tragedy doesn't just stalk the land, we see it in speeded up footage of maggot-ridden, decaying animals. The cumulative effect is gruelling and veers alarmingly close to Pythonesque parody.

Taking his material by the scruff of the neck, Kotting brands it with his own style, even using bizarre expressions and dialogue that is often hard to catch. He is clearly a bold, original talent who brings a sense of reckless bravado to this particular project. The result is neither easy nor comfortable viewing and may be a challenge that most audiences will choose to forego.

Prod co: Tall Stories
Int'l sales: FilmFour
Exec prod: Robin Gutch
Prod: Ben Woolford
Scr: Andrew Kotting, Sean Lock
Cinematography: N.G.Smith
Prod des: Judith Stanley-Smith
Ed: Cliff West
Music: David Burnand
Main cast: Shane Attwooll, Rebecca Palmer, Demelza Randall, Xavier Tchili, Dudley Sutton.