Video and performance artist Andrew Kötting follows up his fiction feature debut, This Filthy Earth, with an intriguing film inspired by his own childhood, when he used to hide up in the trees due to his difficult relationship with his father.

In the French countryside, an eccentric family lives in asprawling manor house. Remote and isolated, it is surrounded by a mysterious forest. Freya, the eldest daughter, is getting ready to leave for Russia, and her imminent departure has affected her brother Alex strongly. As their relationship intensifies in her last days, father Andrei intervenes and banishes Alex from the house. Alex, feeling wrongly accused, climbs up on the roof of the house and refuses to ever come down again. At first, the family thinks it’s just a game, but Alex is stubborn. He begins to live in exile, looking down from on high at the family he loves falling apart.

By using a small cast of professional and non-professional actors, Kötting successfully creates a world of magic realism, though still very grounded in the minute details of the ordinary everyday. And his unique visual style, mixing archival footage with material shot on HD, lends itself perfectly to this story, which, while realistic, can also be read as a modern-day fable.