Dispatches #11
Reflections on LIAF, PyR, A new portal to explore the RCA Animation archive, Cecilia Reeve's new show, an upcoming Sonic Cinema event and a bit of EoF news.
Welcome to another round up of recent experimental animation news, thoughts, recommendations and links…
LIAF ‘25 Recap
Last week saw the largest and longest running animation festival in the UK hit the screens of London (and online worldwide). London International Animation Festival 2025 was a great success, and I’m pleased to say that my own small part of it went very well too. I had programmed two screenings of experimental animation, featuring new and recent works alongside a few classics. Both nights were sold out and we were joined by filmmakers Jane Cheadle and Richard Forbes-Hamilton for great Q+As. Big thanks to all at Close Up for hosting us and providing perfect viewing conditions as always. It was great to be back programming with LIAF this year after a couple of years’ break, and to share these incredible films with such engaged and receptive audiences.
My screenings were just a fraction of the vast offering LIAF presented this year, with 32 screenings and events taking place over 10 days. The opening event this year was a tribute to Emma Calder, who very sadly passed away in 2024. Emma was a trailblazing animator, designer, illustrator and teacher, and a vital presence in the UK animation scene. It was a very moving and yet highly enjoyable evening, with a selection of Emma’s films followed by a panel discussion featuring friends, family and colleagues. It was particularly great to see some of Emma’s earlier works on film, which looked and sounded fantastic in the main cinema at the Barbican.
Madame Potatoe (1983) by Emma Calder
The RCA Animation Archive
Among many other highlights at LIAF this year was a great programme of films from the archives of the Royal College of Art Animation MA, chosen by LIAF from over 1000 films and co-curated with RCA tutor Dr Carla Mackinnon and associate lecturer Rory Waudby-Tolley. Both Carla and Rory also studied at the RCA1 (as did I, and indeed as did Emma Calder) and the course has had an incredible influence on animation in the UK and beyond. Needless to say the archive is a real treasure trove of amazing work. I have also been involved in putting together another selection of work from the archive, which will be announced in due course, and it was quite an intense and revelatory experience looking through these four decades of student work. Happily Rory has put together a wonderful website where you can sample over 300 of these works for free, complete with a great ‘shuffle’ function to help you explore at random. This might be the perfect thing for anyone caught in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year, when time stands still and you need a pick-me-up.
The films are those which are currently online publicly. If you are an RCA Animation graduate and your film is online but not on the list, all you need to do is fill in this handy form to have it included. Hats off to Rory for all this great work!
Trailer for Deluge (2024) by Meejin Hong
Deluge
I was really pleased to see Meejin Hong win the Best Abstract Film Award at LIAF, for her extraordinary film Deluge. The film was in the ‘Abstract Showcase’ and was also part of my Edge of Frame programme, and many audience members were talking to me about it afterwards. Do try and see it on the big screen if it comes to a festival near you, it’s truly an incredible work. Congratulations to Meejin and the other award winners, all of whom you can read about here.
Punto y Raya ‘25
Also wrapping up last weekend was the Punto y Raya Festival 2025, which this year took place in Sofia, Bulgaria rather than its usual Lisbon. The festival is (I believe) the only to focus completely on non-representational abstract ‘audiovisual art’, and its amazing to see the scope and variety of films being made in this area. You might not call every work in the programme ‘animation’ in the strictest sense, but much of it evidently is. The festival also has a range of special programmes, masterclasses2 as well as live performances which this year came from Max Hattler + Sune Petersen, Myriam Boucher and Mario Radev. I was pleased to see one of my favourite animators Richard Reeves win an award at this year’s festival, and was astounded to get an Honourable Mention myself for my film Night Music. As someone who has never won a single award in my 25+ years of making films this was pretty exciting! All this year’s festival award winners can be found here. As I’ve made my film public on Vimeo now I guess I’ll post it here…
Night Music (2024) by Edwin Rostron
Sleepwalking
I featured Cecilia Reeve’s film Porous in an earlier Dispatches post. You can currently see new work by the London-based artist and animator in a solo exhibition at Soho Revue gallery in London. Sleepwalking explores a “hypnotic, intangible space between reality and dreams, inviting viewers into a suspended liminal world” and combines watercolour on cell frames with hand-drawn digital frame-by-frame sequences and painted backgrounds. Catch it before it closes on 20th December! All info here.
Sonic Cinema
Sonic Cinema is a research project and event series by Oliver Dickens, exploring the intersection of moving-image, sound art and music practice. Oliver has curated many wonderful events in recent years, including highly memorable and inspiring screenings of work by Peter Tscherkassky, Rainer Kohlberger and Phil Solomon among others, as well as collaborating with me on a two-part Jodie Mack programme for LIAF 2018. The next Sonic Cinema event is a programme of works by Vienna based filmmakers Viktoria Schmid and Johann Lurf, artists working “at the intersection of the cinema and exhibition space, exploring shared interests in cinematic technologies, landscape, and human perception”. I don’t know their work but I am excited to discover it, as Oliver always presents fascinating programmes which are pretty essential for anyone interested in experimental moving image. It’s at the ICA on Thursday 22nd January 2026 at 6:45 pm, and Viktoria Schmid and Johann Lurf will be present for a Q&A after the screening. Full details here.
Edge of Frame news
One final note is just to say that the old Edge of Frame Wordpress site will soon be going offline for good. All of the 40+ interviews on that site will be moved to this Substack, where they will continue to be available to read for free in the archive. I started the EoF Wordpress blog in 2013 in a rare moment of motivation and optimism, when I momentarily could not think of a reason not to do it (after many years of always having plenty of obvious reasons not to (i.e life)). But once I started it I was amazed to find there was a considerable audience around the world as interested in experimental animation as I was, and so I kept going. It’s a very different world now to 2013, for experimental and independent animation as with everything else, but thankfully there continues to be plenty of people interested in this unique and diverse art form. Thanks to you all for reading.
And both Carla and Rory are wonderful filmmakers in their own rights too. I just saw Rory’s new one and it is amazing!
Many of which are online, as I discussed a bit in my last Dispatches post.
Fantastic resource with the RCA archive portal. The shuffle function is genius for discovery, kinda like stumbling through a physical archive but without the dust. I spent way too much time exploring random student work from difrent decades and it's wild how you can see techniques evolve while certain preoccupations with texture and timing stay constant. The accessibility of this archive feels like it'll be huge for understanding how experimental animation developed in the UK.
Thank YOU. Just last night I saw (and heard!) your Night Music with the touring Cosmic Rays selections at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, CA. Absolutely loved it.