Amy Lockhart retrospective, Mercy for the Messy, screens at LA Filmforum Sunday

LA Filmforum presents a 14-film retrospective of animator Amy Lockhart on Sep 27 2026 at 2220 Arts + Archives, with the filmmaker and curator Sam Gurry in attendance.

Los Angeles Filmforum will host Mercy for the Messy: The Films of Amy Lockhart on Sunday, September 27, 2026 at 7:30 p.m., showcasing fourteen works created between 1998 and 2026. The screening takes place at 2220 Arts + Archives, a volunteer-run cultural center in Historic Filipinotown, and will conclude with a post-screening conversation featuring Lockhart and curator Sam Gurry.

Tickets are $15 for the general public, $10 for students and seniors, and free for Filmforum members. Advance tickets and additional details are available on the Filmforum schedule page LA Filmforum. The event is listed as a free entry on the venue’s ticketing site Dice.fm.

Lockhart’s oeuvre spans hand-drawn animation, puppetry, 16 mm film, collage and deliberately cheap digital tools. The program opens with Sylva Lining (1998), her first 16 mm piece completed while studying with Helen Hill, then moves through early works such as The Devil Lives in Hollywood (1999) and the canonical Walk for Walk (2005), before arriving at later digital pieces like Jessica (2014) and Pond Life Spring (2018). The retrospective culminates with a three-minute teaser for The Dizzler (2026), a forthcoming feature about a disgraced superhero-pop star seeking redemption after a public catastrophe.

Lockhart’s style is described as “sticky-sweet” and “punk without being precious,” populated by characters who are simultaneously soft, sharp, grotesque, glamorous, stupid, powerful and pathetic. Curator Sam Gurry emphasizes the filmmaker’s mantra, “Nobody here is disposable,” noting that the films celebrate the sweaty, the silly and the maligned. The discussion after the screening will let audiences hear directly from the artist about how imperfection becomes power and whimsy turns into armor.

Beyond the screen, Lockhart’s reputation is international. Her animations have screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the British Film Institute, Anthology Film Archives, GLAS Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival and Hiroshima International Animation Festival. Her drawings, comics and paintings appear in publications by Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly and Colour Code, and her films are held in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Experimental Animation Archive. She lives in Chicago and teaches animation at DePaul University DePaul.

Founded in 1975, Los Angeles Filmforum is the longest-running nonprofit venue in Southern California dedicated exclusively to non-commercial, experimental moving-image art. Its mission is to promote a greater understanding of media art by providing a forum for independently produced work that rarely reaches mainstream audiences About LA Filmforum. Filmforum programs typically include post-screening Q&As, and this event follows that tradition with Lockhart and Gurry on-stage.

The screening will be held at 2220 Arts + Archives, located at 2220 Beverly Blvd. in the Historic Filipinotown neighborhood. The center’s programming team collaborates with a range of arts nonprofits, including Acropolis Cinema, Black Editions and LA Filmforum itself, and it serves as a hub for film, literature, music and performance 2220 Arts. The venue’s intimate layout and community-focused ethos make it an ideal setting for a work-in-progress teaser like The Dizzler.

By pairing a high-profile animation retrospective with a community-run space, the event underscores Los Angeles’ layered ecosystem of experimental art: a historic nonprofit providing curatorial rigor, a grassroots venue offering accessible space, and an internationally recognized animator whose DIY ethos resonates with the city’s own culture of remix and reinvention.

Lockhart’s DIY aesthetic mirrors the maker-spirit that fuels LA’s independent art scenes, from the skate-park murals of Echo Park to the low-budget animation labs in downtown studios. Bringing her three-decade survey to 2220 Arts + Archives not only spotlights a pioneering animator but also reinforces the city’s commitment to preserving and celebrating work that lives outside the commercial studio system.