PAPER TRAIL (2026) (14mins) - London Premiere
A life, seen through paper.

The new animated film from Don Hertzfeld, Paper Trail, has won the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision from the Sundance Film Festival. It has also won Best Animated Short Film and the Audience Award from SXSW. The film will celebrate its London Premiere as part of this special shorts programme curated by Director Don Hertzfeld. Presented as part of Bleak Week 2026. 

THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (2015) (17mins)
A little girl is taken on a mind-bending tour of her distant future.

Don Hertzfeldt is a two-time Academy Award nominee whose animated films include It's Such a Beautiful Day, the World of Tomorrow series, and Rejected. His work has played around the world, receiving hundreds of awards, and in 2014 made a special guest appearance on The Simpsons. Eight of his films have screened in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, where he is the only filmmaker to have won the Grand Jury Prize for Short Film twice.

After animating for over twenty years using traditional tools (pencil, paper, and 35mm cameras), World of Tomorrow was Hertzfeldt's first digital production.

Indiewire called the first episode of World of Tomorrow "one of the best films of 2015," while The Dissolve named it "one of the finest achievements in sci-fi in recent memory." The A.V. Club described the film as "visionary" and "possibly the best film of 2015." Rolling Stone ranked World of Tomorrow #10 on its list of the "Greatest Animated Movies Ever."

IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY (2012) (62mins)
Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche.

Originally released as three short films over the course of six years, the picture was captured entirely in-camera on a 35mm rostrum animation stand. Built in the 1940s and used by Hertzfeldt on all of his animated films since 1999, it was one of the last surviving cameras of its kind still operating in the world, indispensable in creating the story's unique images and visual effects. IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY painstakingly blended traditional hand-drawn animation and experimental optical effects with new digital hybrids, printed out one frame at a time, and placed under the camera. The film's signature "split screen" effects were achieved by photographing the animation through small holes that were positioned just beneath the camera lens. One area of the film frame would be individually photographed, the film was then rewound, another section of the frame would be exposed through a different hole, and the process repeated until all elements of a scene were composited together. Towards the end of production, the old camera's motor began to fail and could no longer advance the film properly, riddling the final reels with unintentional light leaks.

In 2012, the three completed short films about a man named Bill were seamlessly combined to create a new feature film. Upon its original release, IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY was named by many critics as one of the best films of the year. The L.A. Film Critics Association named it runner-up for “Best Animated Film.”In 2014, Time Out New York ranked IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY #16 on its list of the “100 Best Animated Movies Ever Made.”In 2016, The Film Stage's critics ranked the film #1 on their list of “The 50 Best Animated Films of the 21st Century Thus Far.”In 2019, The Wrap named IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY the #1 “Best Animated Film of the 2010s.”The same year, Vulture's film critics ranked it #12 on their overall list of the “Best Movies of the Decade.”In 2021, IGN's Cinefix placed it #1 on their “Top 10 Animated Films of All Time” list.

IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY is currently ranked #101 on Letterboxd’s official list of the Top 500 highest-rated narrative feature films of all time.

This remarkable television production, imagining how a nuclear war might unfold, remains one of the most shocking and devastating films ever to air in the UK. Combining documentary-style realism and kitchen-sink drama, Threads observes the looming threat of nuclear war from the perspective of an average working-class family in Sheffield, before shifting to the detailed depiction of a society in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. It’s 40 years since the film was originally broadcast and it has lost none of its power to shock.

BLEAK WEEK : CINEMA OF DESPAIR is co-presented by the American Cinematheque.

After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May '68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache's own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.

For kids around the world, music is often the only salvation when the pain and anxiety of teenage life becomes too much to bear. Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) is in the 8th grade and he worships Lily Chou-Chou, a Bjork-like chanteuse whose epic music is lush and transcendent. Yuichi only lives for Lily Chou-Chou's big Tokyo concert, where the lies and violence can be washed away by the presence of his goddess and her powerful music. But fate has yet another obstacle in store for Lily's devoted fan.