Watch a selec­tion of incred­i­ble short films by emerg­ing talent

This year’s Play­back Fes­ti­val brings togeth­er over 300 short films made by young artist film­mak­ers from across Eng­land. Among them is Grace Lee, an artist work­ing across ani­ma­tion, draw­ing and paint­ing who grad­u­at­ed with a BA in Fine Art from Gold­smiths in 2017. We spoke to Grace about how she got start­ed in ani­ma­tion, and what inspired her to make The Baths, a clip of which you can watch below.

“I’ve always loved the process of ani­ma­tion and first start­ed by mak­ing very basic (by which I mean real­ly bad) ani­ma­tions in MS Paint and Win­dows Movie Mak­er soon after my fam­i­ly got our first com­put­er when I was about sev­en years old.

“I grad­u­al­ly improved my soft­ware and draw­ing tools, and I made a few short films for art projects in school. At uni­ver­si­ty, I moved away from nar­ra­tive film for a while and worked on some small loop­ing ani­ma­tions. These are much faster to do, and it avoid­ed ded­i­cat­ing a whole year of my degree to one piece of work. When I saw the ICA were doing an open call for film pro­pos­als I was very excit­ed to try some­thing longer again.

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“The idea for The Baths first came from vis­it­ing my friend’s stu­dio at Gold­smiths, in a build­ing that used to be a pub­lic swim­ming pool. A lot of the orig­i­nal struc­tures are still there, like the cubi­cles and the bal­cony, and I always felt a strange melan­choly when I was there. There’s some­thing about repur­posed build­ings that seems strange­ly sad, as if the ghost of their for­mer pur­pose is still here. It remind­ed me of a place I vis­it­ed sev­er­al times as a child. My fam­i­ly used to go on hol­i­day in Mat­lock Bath.

“I don’t know why, but for a while in my ear­ly child­hood this was a year­ly occur­rence. It’s a strange place in itself, with a lot to do with fairy tales and witch­craft, but there’s an aquar­i­um there (which is attached to a holo­gram muse­um, anoth­er quirk of the town), and at the back there’s an aban­doned swim­ming pool that’s been turned into a big Koi Pond. We always went at night and there’s no ceil­ing on the build­ing, so my mem­o­ry is of this dark, decay­ing struc­ture that was once some­thing quite grand – and now there are fish there.

“It’s not exact­ly a sad place, and I don’t think my film is exact­ly a sad film, but there’s some­thing sad there any­way. This was what I want­ed to explore, those feel­ings of loss, nos­tal­gia and long­ing – and fish in a swim­ming pool.”

Play­back is a joint ini­tia­tive between Arts Coun­cil Eng­land and Chan­nel 4 aimed at devel­op­ing young people’s skills and pro­vid­ing them with entry points to the arts and cre­ative industries.

All 300 plus short films at Play­back Fes­ti­val were made as part of a joint ini­tia­tive between Arts Coun­cil Eng­land and Chan­nel 4 Ran­dom Acts, and have been tour­ing the coun­try for the past year as part of the Play­back Exhi­bi­tion. The film offer a snap­shot of a nation­al expe­ri­ence and reveal the pow­er of film in a chang­ing world.

Play­back Fes­ti­val is entire­ly free and takes place at ICA Lon­don between 21 – 25 March. Some events are sold out, but you can still grab tick­ets from the ICA web­site. Keep updat­ed via @ICALondon and #Playback2018