Winter 2025 – news from LIAF

Here’s a few items of interest from us at LIAF HQ as it slowly gear up towards this years festival. LIAF’s dates are set, the venues are booked and the programming is starting to come together. As ever LIAF is brimming with ideas and will be seeing which ones bubble to the top of the surface as the year moves on.

The dates to pop in your diary are Friday Nov 28 to Sunday Dec 7 when LIAF will be back for the 22nd festival at these 5 venues – Barbican, Garden Cinema, Horse Hospital, Close Up and the Puppet Theatre Barge – plus online on LIAF streaming platform.

Entries are already pouring in – LIAF’s seen some cracking films LIAF can’t wait to share with you – and remains open for entries until July 31st. All entry details can be found here:

Entries

As LIAFll as all the usual programmes, this year LIAF are really pleased to be LIAFlcoming back Edge of Frame into the LIAF fold after 3 years away. Edwin Rostron will be putting together 2 programmes for us from artists working in bold and daring ways, using animation to pursue personal visions, raw expressions, formal experiments and investigations into unknown territory.

LIAF ’ll drip-feed updates throughout the year with occasional newsletters and on its social channels.

LIAF KIDS SCREENING

LIAF’ll be presenting the first kids screening of the year at the gorgeous Garden Cinema in the heart of London on Saturday and Sunday March 1st and 2nd – two special screenings for children and their families.

Note: this is the same programme repeated twice.

LIAF’s dug deep into the archives and have selected 7 of the best short animated films full of visually dazzling joy from all around the world, for kids of all ages and the whole family.

Here you will meet charismatic characters such as a group of bonkers playful singing children, a frog in a school class of rabbits and the mysterious Burry Man –  in a series of stunning visuals mixed with captivating storylines, showing that animation is the best tool to transform the everyday into the magical.

Both screenings are pay what you can.

More information and booking details here:

The London International Animation Festival presents Spectacular Animated Shorts for 6 – 14 year-old

LIAF WON AN AWARD!

LIAF LIAFre recently the proud recipient of a Film London Lodestars Award for best exhibitor in London. Director Nag Vladermersky was present to accept the award and trophy. Thanks to everyone who nominated and voted for us and thanks to Film London for organising a great event. More details on the award here –

https://filmlondon.org.uk/latest/film-london-lodestars-2025-winners-announced

OTHER ANIMATION SCREENINGS

There’s some great animated film screenings coming up in cinemas in London and across the UK over the next couple of months. Here’s some of the recommendations:

Memoir of a Snail: UK wide screening from now on.

Academy Award-winning® animation writer and director Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail is a poignant, heartfelt, hilarious chronicle of the life of an outsider finding her confidence and silver linings amongst the clutter of everyday life. This stunning stop-motion feature tells the story of Grace Pudel, a lonely misfit with an affinity for collecting ornamental snails and an intense love for books. At a young age, when Grace is separated from her fire-breathing twin brother Gilbert, she falls into a spiral of anxiety and angst. Despite a continued series of hardships, inspiration and hope emerge when she strikes up an enduring friendship with an elderly eccentric woman named Pinky, who is full of grit and lust for life.

The Brothers Quay: London screenings and exhibition in March

As part of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, Gareth Evans has put together two screenings of the Brothers Quay’s short films in March at the Garden Cinema. Gareth writes “Surely the world’s greatest practising stop-motion artist animators, the Brothers Quay have been painstakingly crafting their own unique, interlinked universe of astonishingly imagined animated worlds for over 45 years. Creating across the short, medium and long form, as LIAFll as in production design for opera, ballet and theatre, theirs is a startling cosmology, one informed and inhabited by the mystery and melancholy dreaming of Central and Eastern European artists, writers and wayward wanderers, most notably from the Polish constellation.”

The Brothers will be in conversation with Gareth after the first screening on March 30th.

Details here:

Quay Brothers Short Films Programme 1

Plus – in a world first for an assembly at this scale – 23 of their immaculately hand-crafted puppet film sets by the Brothers Quay will be on display in Bloomsbury’s SLIAFdenborg House from March 18th to April 4th.

Details here:

https://www.sLIAFdenborg.org.uk/events/quaybrothers/

Plus – the Brother’s latest feature film ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ will screen on the UK’s largest screen on 26 March at BFI IMAX. The Quay Brothers’ new feature is a distinctive stop-motion work where dreams, fantasies and memories blur, creating a wondrous alternative reality.

Details here:

https://kinoteka.org.uk/programme/sanatorium-under-the-sign-of-the-hourglass-sanatorium-pod-klepsydra-bfi-imax-screening

AND FINALLY

One of the favourite films by one of favourite filmmakers is now available to watch online. Atsushi Wada’s “Bird of a Peninsula” can be seen here:

In his latest work — a bizarro fusion of Buster Keaton, Jon Fosse, and Mike Judge — Wada offers a coming-of-age tale that explores themes of identity, gender, and ritual. In the film, a group of boys performs a ritual dance under the watchful eye of a supervisor whose ever-present whistle hangs loosely betLIAFen his lips as he diligently takes notes and corrects their movements. Meanwhile, deep below the surface, a scientist conducts experiments in a lab with a giant who appears to have wandered off from Swift’s depiction of Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels. On the surface, a girl watches the dance, desperate to join in.

Bird in the Peninsula was co-produced by Miyu Productions and New Deer.