LIAF 2021: Q&A with Nag Vladermersky
The London International Animation Festival (LIAF 2021), will be returning this week for its mammoth 18th edition, promising ten days of “forums, screen talks and 279 of the best recent, historical and retrospective animated shorts and features from around the world”. Taking the form of a hybrid edition, this year’s programme will feature online accessible to those outside of London and the UK as well as physical screenings and presentations across five London venues – the Barbican, Hackney Picturehouse, Horse Hospital, Close-Up Cinema and the Puppet Theatre Barge. With programme highlights including the long-running International Competition strands, special programmes including the popular Late Night Bizarre and Music Video sessions, a look at the making of the Netflix hit series Love, Death + Robots, a retrospective on the work of Joseph Wallace and the world premiere of the new Shaun the Sheep special The Flight Before Christmas, Skwigly caught up with founder, director and chief programmer Nag Vladermersky to learn about the long-running event’s roots and what else this year’s edition has in store.
It’d be great to kind of hear a bit about your own background and how you came to be involved with the festival.
I actually came at it from an animator’s point of view – about 25 years ago I was actually making independent, short films myself. At the time, I was living in Australia and one of the films that I made with my partner did relatively well on the independent animation festival circuit, it went to most of the major festivals around then, like Stuttgart, Ottawa, Annecy, and I was lucky enough to get invited to go along and visit these festivals. At the time I didn’t really know that much about festivals but I was really excited to get invited and talk about my film. Then I came back to Melbourne, where I was living at the time, and with my partner and a guy who was running the animation component of the New Zealand Film Festival, we decided just to set up a small three day animation event with some of the films we’d seen through our travels. We screened that in a small theater in Melbourne and it was hugely successful; there were literally people queuing around the block, just all through word of mouth. That gave us the bug to start something.
Then I relocated back to London and I just decided to start putting on one-off events here and there. Curzon cinema in Soho was our first major venue, and it just grew and grew. We started applying for some more funding and eighteen years later here we are, with a ten day, mammoth festival. It employs three of us pretty much full time but we very much have what I like to call a ‘DIY ethic’. I don’t have any degrees in business or marketing, it’s just all through talking to people and finding out what they want to see. We’ve always got loads of ideas for stuff we want to work on so it’s very much still at a passion project for us all.
And is there still a connection to Melbourne as well? I remember there being events that were tied to each other…
Yeah, very much. I mean, the Melbourne festival is still going, it’s had a rough time the last two years because of the pandemic. In fact, the last festival had to get canceled at the very last minute and would have been the 20th anniversary, so that’s a shame. Now, Malcolm, who’s the main festival director there, is looking towards doing a big one for the 25th anniversary. But yeah, we have very big connections we share. One of the major things we do is we share the entries, they come to both of us and we have an enormous amount of entries that come our way; this year it was getting close to 2500 entries. And pretty much half of them come into Melbourne and half of them come to London and we just database them all and share the links with each other. A lot of the films that get screened in Melbourne do get screened in London, and vice versa. So we share that, Malcolm does a lot of writing for our festival, he comes over and visits often as well. So yeah, there’s big connections.
Can you tell me a bit about what goes into curating the special programs of the festival?
We like to go and visit archives in the country of the festival – for instance Malcolm spent a significant amount of time in Hungary looking at several archives from Pannonia. We like to meet the filmmakers and the animators as well and do interviews with them, because that sort of informs the screenings. So all of those specialised screenings are a continual side of things that we’re always thinking about. There’s other people we have very strong and long-standing relationships with who curate programs specifically for LIAF, such as Edwin Rostron, who runs Edge of Frame and has been curating screenings for LIAF for about five years now. They’re more towards the experimental side of animation and this year he’s curated two fantastic programs, one looking at the work of Robert Breer, an amazing animator who has also influenced a lot of contemporary animators today. The other program is the contemporary animators who are influenced by his work and some of the work they have made. Also, there’s Abigail Addison who curates the fantastic Figures in Focus programmes for LIAF. These are films made by female and non-binary animators in recognition of the under-representation of their stories within the independent animation sector,
With this year going hybrid is it exciting to welcome filmmakers and attendees back to the festival in person?
Oh, yeah, absolutely it’s just great because for us, personally, and I think most of the festivals, a lot filmmakers come along, to talk about their films and screen their films. Even this year, with COVID, we’ve got filmmakers coming over from America, we’ve got a couple coming from France, loads of British filmmakers will be there as well, to introduce their films and meet other filmmakers and meet the audience – and the audience loves to see a filmmaker in the flesh, talking about the process or how they made their film. It’s a big part of the whole festival experience, having filmmakers there, up on stage, talking about it. In the past we’ve had workshops from some of these filmmakers but we haven’t got back to that stage yet, that’s still on hold. Hopefully we’ll get back to doing that as well, but yeah, the live talks and live appearances by filmmakers are really important, and the networking parties afterwards. The whole in-cinema thing is all about a celebration of animation, so you want to do that with the audience and the filmmakers.
What are some other festival highlights from this year’s edition?
Well, apart from all of the general competition screenings – there are 80 films in our main eight competition screenings this year – we have other competitive screenings, like the music video program. We’ve got the Best of British Showcase screening, which is also competitive. Of the more themed or specialised programs we’re focusing on this year, the big one is three Japanese screenings as part of the BFI Japan 2021 series of screenings. This has been a longtime project for us, it got postponed largely because of COVID. We really wanted to screen this stuff in cinema so we left it for another year. One of them’s a retrospective look at Atsushi Wada, who’s been making films for about 20 years now and they’ve screened at all of the major animation festivals. He’s only had one retrospective worldwide before but he’s got a particular, very beautiful, quite still drawing style, very much influenced by Japanese Noh theater and the concept of Ma, which is to do with stillness. They’re just quite surreal short films involving some weird interactions between humans and animals, to put it in a nutshell! The films have won awards at not just animation festivals, but other short film festivals. One of his films, The Great Rabbit, a few years ago won the Silver Bear at Berlin. He’s a fantastic animator, so we’ve got a whole focus on him. He’s also part of a screen talk we’re doing with another Japanese animator called Sarina Nihei, who studied at the Royal College of Art. She’s very influenced by Estonian animation and she’s made about four or five short films. She’s also part of a screening of independent Japanese animation we’re screening.
We’ve looked back at some of the films we’ve screened over the last year 10 years and we put together a program called The Trippy Worlds of Indie Japanese Animation, and it’s wild! The third Japanese screening we’ve got is a premiere of this amazing feature film, seven years in the making. It’s called Junk Head and it’s a 75 minute-long stop-motion sci-fi action thriller. The person who made it, Takahide Hori, is a self taught animator, and it’s just incredible. He’s literally done everything himself, all the sets, all of the puppets, he’s even done all the sound himself. He originally taught himself just from YouTube tutorials. It’s absolutely incredible and it’s a one off screening at the Barbican, we’re not allowed to screen it online so it’s literally the only chance people get to see it this year. I imagine next year it will be on the film festival circuit in a huge way but it’s been doing really, really well in Japan in cinemas as well. So we’re very excited to be screening that.
This year, the title of the opening night program from Figures in Focus is Up Yours as a homage to the X-Ray Spex/Poly Styrene song Oh Bondage! Up Yours! from the 1970s. It’s basically a program all about revolt and protesting against stuff that’s going on now. It’s a great selection of films, everything’s up on our website now and those are some of the highlights.
The full programme for LIAF 2021, which runs from November 26th-December 5th, is available at LIAF.ORG.UK