The London International Animation Festival, 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 it 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 running alongside live and prerecorded panel discussions with many of the worlds’ leading animators and industry players.

There will be two Polish events worth recommendation:

Kill it and Leave this Town (2020) – feature film by Mariusz Wilczynski

November 30th at 6:10pm/screening online BOOK HERE

Taking 14 years to come to fruition, veteran animator Mariusz Wilczynski presents a deeply personal look at his own life and that of his parents. Winner of the best feature film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, this surreal and striking animation sees Mariusz Wilczynski revive the memories of 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.

A trilogy of films by Karolina Glusiec: The Instrument/The Fool/The Landscape (2013-2020)

December 2nd at 6pm/screening online BOOK HERE

Karolina is a Polish-born visual artist working mainly across animated and DIY film media, inspired by ways of seeing and ways of remembering, and a frequent collaborator in projects inspired by and rooted in music. Her drawing style is immediately recognisable due to it’s loose, layered, and rapidly applied look. What at first appears abstract quickly becomes the embodiment of a moment in time, especially when those loose lines begin to move within her animated works. By stripping away the specific detail of a scene she is able to evoke something that feels more at the root of the subject, often making her films play like a recorded memory.

Karolina’s work has screened widely at festivals and galleries around the world, winning prizes at Ann Arbor Festival, Vienna Independent Shorts Festival as well as the 2012 Jerwood Drawing Prize.