Mercy for the Messy: The films of Amy Lockhart

Pond Life Spring, by Amy Lockhart

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Mercy for the Messy: The films of Amy Lockhart

Sunday September 27, 2026, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90057

In person: Amy Lockhart and curator Sam Gurry!

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
https://link.dice.fm/Y44ad65bada1

“Sexy dames, sexy dames. What’s going on in this world? Do we have no shame?” — The Devil Lives in Hollywood

Amy Lockhart is one of the defining voices in contemporary independent animation. Originally from Winnipeg, she now lives and works in Chicago, where she teaches at DePaul University. Her influence stretches across independent animation, contemporary art, and studio television, with artists and filmmakers regularly citing her as an inspiration.

Lockhart’s work is DIY without being slight, punk without being precious, and funny without ever filing down the weird. Across paper, pencil, 16mm, collage, puppets, cheap software, and whatever else is around, she has built a body of work that is crude, sharp, and completely her own.

Her films are full of cartoon superstars, sweaty women, deadpan domesticity, mass-media meltdowns, and bodies pushed well past good taste. Her women are soft, sharp, grotesque, glamorous, stupid, powerful, pathetic, and sometimes all of those things at once. Nobody here is disposable. The sweaty, the silly, the maligned; what if we loved them anyway?

There is something sticky-sweet and sour at the perimeter: the blue residue left on your tongue after raspberry lollipop. Whimsy becomes armor, camouflage, and threat. Beneath the big hair, big hearts, big brains, and big tits is something dirtier and darker. Women socialized into roles of being kind, accommodating, beautiful, or harmless are suddenly drugging their friends, eating each other, dropping the baby - oh, whoops! - and carrying on like nothing happened.

Lockhart’s work finds power in imperfection and danger in sweetness. Care becomes control. Pleasure ferments into menace. The lines stay flat, the jokes stay deadpan, and nobody seems particularly interested in behaving.

Notes and Program by Sam Gurry

Amy Lockhart is a filmmaker, animator and artist. Her animations have screened internationally, including the Whitney, NY, British Film Institute, N.Y. Anthology Film Archives, GLAS Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Ottawa International Animation Festival, Carnegie Mellon, and Hiroshima International Animation Festival. Her drawings, comics and paintings have been published by Fantagraphics (Ditch Life, 2019), Drawn & Quarterly (Dirty Dishes, 2009), and by Colour Code (Looking Inward, 2016). Her animations are in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Experimental Animation Archive.

Walk for Walk

Canada, 2005, 16mm, color/sound, 10 min.

Built from a series of vignettes, Walk for Walk began with ten to twenty character-based walk cycle - looping drawings of figures in motion. Pulled from Lockhart’s sketchbooks and those of her friends, the characters are dropped into strange little scenarios, then stitched together into one joyful, irreverent procession. A canonical Lockhart film and a modern classic of independent animation.

Sylva Lining

Canada, 1998, 16mm, color/sound, 1 min.

“This is the first animation I completed on 16mm film while taking Helen Hill’s Experimental Animation Course in Halifax, NS, CA. I am forever grateful to have been shaped by Miss Helen Wingard Hill’s presence.” - Lockhart

The Devil Lives in Hollywood

Canada, 1999, 16mm, color/sound, 6 min.

There is no character in a rush here, with elements ambling from one tableau to the next. This drawn-on-paper animation assembles mass-media icons, body parts, and machines. Smeared, misshapen little boys eat burgers while the narrator brightly sings, “If I had X-ray vision, I’d try to see the truth, but I don’t.” Cars ebb into frame, all shiny and chrome. Guilt, desire, and ennui are candy-coated in saccharine splendor. A face hurts from smiling too much.

The Collagist

Canada, 2009, 16mm, color/sound, 2 min.

The artist at work. A desk and its ephemera come to life through looping animations and cycles. Each item is thoughtfully considered, its elements multiplying until each becomes a unique iteration of its own. Everything is finally in its place, until a chunky, puppeted napkin wipes it all away. Deft, zippy sound design punctuates each moment. Animation based on the collages of Marc Bell.

Ploce

Music video for New Fries

Canada, 2020, digital, color/sound, 2 min. 30 sec.

Made for Toronto no-wave band New Fries, Ploce pairs the song’s anxious repetition with Lockhart’s wonderfully creepy parade of hand-drawn bodies and mutations.

Jessica

Canada, 2014, digital, color/sound, 5 min.

Jessica, a classic heroine of the Lockhart persuasion, turns on the radio to start her day. In high heels and red lipstick, she carries all the markers of traditional femininity- then shakes her hips and drops the baby. Lockhart provides every voice in this tight, stripped-down film, where domestic routine slips effortlessly into absurdity.

Pond Life Spring

Canada, 2018, digital, color/sound, 1 min.

A Real Housewives-style “next time on” teaser dragged through Lockhart’s pond muck. Sharp angles, flat lines, grotesque bodies, and petty chaos turn duck consciousness into reality TV.

Pond Life Summer

Canada, 2018, digital, color/sound, 1 min.

More Bravo by way of the swamp. Eggs are laid but you’ll never guess where.

Bonk

By Amy Lockhart & Marc Bell

Canada, 1999, 16mm, color/sound, 1 min.

Spoilers!!!!! Bonk.

Landscapes

Canada, 2013, digital, color/sound, 9 min.

Commissioned by the Toronto Animated Image Society as part of “Hello Amiga”, Landscapes was created entirely with Amiga software. Lockhart uses its stamps, drawing tools, and happy glitches to build a series of figures wandering through different scenarios. A synthetic eden made of digital construction paper.

Miss Edmonton Teenburger 1983 in It's Party Time!!

Canada, 2001, digital, color/sound, 17 min.

Originally commissioned by Alex MacKenzie, filmmaker and programmer at Vancouver’s former Blinding Light!! Cinema, the film is a trashy, debaucherous delight that introduces Miss Teenburger herself. The former glamour girl is now mired in rote domesticity and desperate to get out. What follows is smeared in vomit and vanilla frosting.

Made for just $10, with sets constructed from trash, the film stars Matthew Fithen, who created the character based on girls he grew up with in Edmonton. Miss Teenburger takes her name from the popular Canadian fast-food chain, A&W, where they once served a “teen Burger” with “teen sauce.” Eat up!

Miss Edmonton Teenburger 1983 in You’re Eternal…

Canada, 2002, digital, color/sound, 7 min.

A campy romp through a DIY medieval Alberta, the film feels like eating raw cookie dough. Shot on 16mm in a small apartment, Miss Teenburger huffs glue, does the robot, and gets bangs - all in one day.

Lady Flex

Canada, 2006, 16mm, color/sound, 1 min.

“A lady flexes.” - Lockhart

The Dizzler Teaser

Canada, 2026, digital, color/sound, 3 min.

A teaser for Lockhart’s upcoming film, The Dizzler in Maskerheid. The Dizzler is both superhero and pop star, “with a predilection for song and dance and the uncanny power to spurt lasers from her eyes.” After a public tragedy and a stint in rehab, she returns to her Nebraska hometown with all eyes on her and a chance at redemption.