His new film, Lek and the Dogs, is about a boy who lived with a pack of wild animals in Moscow, and was inspired by Hattie Naylor´s haunting play. The film-maker and playwright talk about archetypal stories and abandoned childrenOn the desolate streets of Boris Yeltsin´s Moscow in the mid-90s, a four-year-old boy named Ivan Mishukov walked out of the home he shared with his mother and his alcoholic stepfather and began living with a pack of wild dogs. For two years, he ran with the mutts, begging for food that he distributed among them and curling up with them at night to protect himself from the harsh climate. The police tried several times to apprehend him, only to be thwarted in their attempts by his snarling posse. Eventually, he was packed off to a children´s shelter. He stopped growling and went back to speaking. `He appears to be just like any other Moscow child,` wrote Michael Newton in his book Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. `Yet it is said that, at night, he dreams of dogs.`The story, which was first reported in July 1998, has been fictionalised in works including Eva Hornung´s novel Dog Boy and the play My Life with the Dogs by the theatre company New International Encounter. But it is Hattie Naylor´s stark, haunting play Ivan and the Dogs that has inspired a new film from the British director and artist Andrew Kötting. Lek and the Dogs uses Ivan´s story to complete Kötting´s Earthworks trilogy, each instalment of which features the character Lek, played by the French actor and performance artist Xavier Tchili. The 2001 film This Filthy Earth was caked in mud and grime, while Ivul, from 2009, took place largely in the treetops. Related: Lek and the Dogs review -Â bemusing tale of Moscow`s Mowgli wild-child Continue reading...
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