London Animation Festival (LIAF) Release 2020 Programme and Passes Now on Sale
Skwigly
The London International Animation Festival (LIAF 2020), the UK’s largest, longest-running and most eclectic animation festival returns for its 17th year with a mammoth 10-day celebratory feast of forums, screen talks and 205 of the best recent, historical and retrospective animated shorts and features from around the world.
This year we will be moving online, bringing the best in animation direct to people’s homes. This means many more people around the country will be able to attend LIAF for the first time. Everything our audience loves about LIAF is being transformed into a virtual version; screenings, industry panels, filmmaker introductions and talks.
Screening programmes and talks will be released daily from 27 November to 6 December, running alongside live and pre-recorded panel discussions with many of the world’s’ leading animators and industry players.
As ever, this year’s uncompromising programme promises to inspire, delight and challenge the notion that animation is merely for the 3D CGI blockbuster genre or cute cartoons for kids. Independent animation is an art form that continues to thrive and develop as a breathtaking medley of styles, materials, techniques and production – from hand drawn, paint on glass, collage, sculpture, cut outs, puppets, abstract, sand/salt, to some of the more interesting developments in CGI – all of which can be seen at this year’s LIAF.
A snapshot of LIAF 2020
- 205 films from 38 countries, 96 premieres.
- 9 international competition screenings including the British Showcase: the best, most recent 97 short films from around the world and the UK.
- 2 feature films, both UK premieres.
- Opening night gala screening – Female Figures ‘Growing Up’ – coming-of-stage films by contemporary female animators
- ‘The Best of the Next’ – the 23 best student films from the world’s best film schools.
- ‘Music video programme’ – this [moved apostrophe]’s best music clips made by the world’s most inventive animators.
- ‘Late Night Bizarre’ – a programme of the craziest, most off-the-wall, films submitted to LIAF this year.
- ‘Edge of Frame’ – 3 programmes of films at the intersection of animation, experimental film and artists’ moving image.
- 4 industry talks and panel discussions by some of the world’s most revered filmmakers and members of the industry.
- 2 childrens screenings, for 0-7 year-olds and 8-14 year-olds.
- ‘The Best of the Fest’ – a roundup of LIAF 2020, where the best films as chosen by audience and industry judges are announced, awarded prizes and re-screened one more time.
2, 710 films were entered into the festival this year and the best 97 have been selected to screen across several competitive categories in 8 International Competition Programmes such as From Absurd to Zany (humorous shorts),
Into The Dark (scary shorts), Animated Documentaries, the Abstract Showcase and the British Showcase. This is a snapshot of the international indie-animation universe showing that animation is alive and well and thriving.
LIAF is first and foremost a British festival and dedicated to showcasing the work of our best animators – industry veterans screen alongside the most promising film school graduates and first-time filmmakers. Nobody in the world screens more British animation than LIAF and the British Showcase programme paints a vibrant picture of a spirited and imaginative animation nation. Several of the filmmakers will be onscreen to introduce their films and talk about the ideas and processes behind them.
This year’s opening night gala at LIAF celebrates women in animation with the Female Figures ‘Growing Up’ programme. As an antidote to these uncertain times this screening features coming of age stories, memories and experiences. In these animated shorts, reflections on childish fantasies and problematic relationships with friends and family are revisited; where young people on the threshold of adulthood grow aware of its challenges and temptations. We witness young people navigating societal norms and gender stereotypes with a growing self-awareness and a desire to resist tradition. Mothers reflect on their own experiences through witnessing their daughter’s lives and daughters interrogate their mothers to examine their own drives and choices.
The screening will be followed by a post-screening conversation with featured animators Maryam Mohajer and Linnea Haviland and academic Dr Caroline Ruddell chaired by curator Abigail Addison.
Two animated feature films that have been scooping awards on the festival circuit will make their British premieres at LIAF on the 29 and 30 November – ‘Circumstantial Pleasures’ (Lewis Klahr, USA, 2020) and ‘Kill It and Leave this Town’ ( Mariusz Wilczynski, Poland, 2020).
Lewis Klahr’s six-part dystopian classic feature ‘Circumstantial Pleasures’ couldn’t be more attuned to the present moment, with its swirling paranoia and rapid change of the past decade. Using the collage technique, in eye-popping colour, and accompanied by music from David Rosenboom, Tom Recchion and Scott Walker, Klahr’s film is a profound and unsettling evocation of our contemporary experience.
Our second feature is ‘Kill It and Leave this Town’ (Poland, 2020) by Mariusz Wilczynski. Taking 14 years to come to fruition this is a deeply personal look at his own life and that of his parents growing up in the industrial town of Łódź during the 60s and 70s when Poland was under communist rule. With dark recollections and surreal dreams, the film takes the viewer into a world of abstract horror, graphic violence and dumbfounding narration – a quest through the animator’s own past that blurs the living and the dead into a bittersweet orgy of squiggles and undefinable sadness.
Other perennial favourite programmes returning to LIAF 2020 are The Best of the Next (the best student work from around the world), the best Music Videos programme and Late Night Bizarre – the craziest films submitted to LIAF in 2020.
The Best of the Next programmes have been selected from 60 graduate showreels, featuring the best 23 student films from all around the world – the first step on the animation ladder for these talented filmmakers, and the first time their wild and wonderful imaginations have been unleashed. Student animation can often be some of the most unbridled and breathtaking films we screen at LIAF, and these films cover all manner of subjects including a stunning fly-on-the-wall depiction of women in a Japanese bath-house, a hard-hitting tale of growing up in the roughest parts of Dublin, a lorry driver’s descent into an otherworldly hell to more serious subjects such as dealing with grief and death, the difficult decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy and a struggle to understand the language of locals from a new immigrant’s viewpoint.
LIAF will also present a screening of the most innovative music videos produced in the last 12 months. Animation is an integral element in many of the best music videos and here are some of the hottest bands and creative animators coming together to produce 80 minutes of pure aural and visual pleasures. Stormzy, the Breeders, Sparks, Deadmau5, Bright Eyes and Yello are all featured alongside several others. Complementing the screening will be a live discussion with some of the creators of these clips which have surged in popularity since the rise of portable screens, with filmmakers increasingly using them as an experimental form with which to test out their artistic ideas.
The Late Night Bizarre screening is LIAF’s annual walk on the wild side featuring the most twisted films to emerge in 2020, a bunch of anti-classics guaranteed to be as far away from Disney as it’s possible to get. 13 of the weirdest, wildest, most demented films hand-picked from the 2,700 entered. This year’s crop include sex-mad fruit orgies, manic acid-fuelled dreams, perverse doggy shenanigans, deranged gluttony, gothic crows, weird group sex, chicken wrestlers, Japanese game-show hosts and a whole lot more barely imaginable scenarios.
For the fifth year running Edge of Frame have put together 3 programmes of extraordinary experimental animation for LIAF, work at the intersection of animation, experimental film and artists’ moving image. The short film programme ‘States of Emergency’ contains 11 works produced in 2019 and 2020, the films reflecting the profoundly turbulent and uncertain times we are living in. These films contain perceptive and sometimes painful resonances with contemporary America, but beyond that they are also some of the most vital and original recent animation works from anywhere on the planet.
The second programme is a trilogy or works, drawn on paper, by Karolina Glusiec – ‘The Instrument / The Fool / The Landscape’ (2013-2020). The Instrument is an ode to listening to music, The Fool a film about dreaming and failing and The Landscape is a film on moving, being held and being placed in places and in between places. Profoundly moving in a very quiet way, these immersive works draw you into their dreamlike states.
The final film in our Edge of Frame programme is the afore-mentioned feature ‘Circumstantial Pleasures’ by Lewis Klahr, USA.
The UK Industry Panel also returns – a series of talks with some of the biggest movers and shakers in the animation industry. Four panels and some of the most passionate, honest and insightful experts from a wide range of different areas and backgrounds, giving insider access to some of the hot topics of the year.
Animation doesn’t stand still; and debates and discussions with animators and creative experts are the best way to get in touch with what’s happening, whether it’s how online animation courses are booming and changing the landscape of the way we teach, the current state of the TV commercial industry, how animation can be used to enhance outdoor events such as projection mapping, public concerts and VJ-ing, and several of the world’s most inspiring filmmakers and animators talking about the sequence of animation that changed them forever.
For anyone currently working in the film and animation industry, thinking of working in the industry or just plain curious, these four talks are indispensable and especially for 2020 we are offering these talks for free worldwide.
The festival is completed with two programmes of films especially for children – Amazing Animations for 0-7 year-olds and Marvellous Animations for 8-15 year-olds. As ever, there will be talking animals, seriously fun adventures and tales that spark all those little imaginations.
The festival ends with the Best of the Festival on Sunday December 6 featuring the best films of LIAF 2020 as chosen by our panel of industry judges and audience votes. This is our roundup of the festival – awards will be announced and judges and award-winning directors invited to say a few words before the curtain comes down on the UK’s largest, longest-running and most eclectic animation festival.
Passes will give people access to the whole festival and will cost just £35 (students and unwaged)/£45 (waged)
Tickets to individual programmes will cost £6.
Tickets and Passes available NOW – directly from the LIAF website at www.liaf.org.uk.