LA Filmforum: The Films of Amy Lockhart

Los Angeles Filmforum presents *Mercy for the Messy: The films of Amy Lockhart*. In person: Amy Lockhart and curator Sam Gurry ~ “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. More at: https://www.lafilmforum.org/ Presented by LA Filmforum This is an 18+ event