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Partially wetting nematic liquid crystal (NLC) films on substrates areunstable to dewetting-type instabilities due to destablizing solid/NLCinteraction forces. These instabilities are modified by the nematic nature ofthe films, which influences the effective solid/NLC interaction. In this work,we focus on the influence of imposed substrate anchoring on the instabilitydevelopment. The analysis is carried out within a long-wave formulation basedon the Leslie-Ericksen description of NLC films. Linear stability analysis ofthe resulting equations shows that some features of the instability, such asemerging wavelengths, may not be influenced by the imposed substrate anchoring.Going further into the nonlinear regime, considered via large-scale GPU-basedsimulations, shows however that nonlinear effects may play an important role,in particular in the case of strong substrate anchoring anisotropy. Oursimulations show that instability of the film develops in two stages: the firststage involves formation of ridges that are perpendicular to the localanchoring direction; and the second involves breakup of these ridges andformation of drops, whose final distribution is influenced by the anisotropyimposed by the substrate. Finally, we show that imposing more complex substrateanisotropy patterns allows us to reach basic understanding of the influence ofsubstrate-imposed defects in director orientation on the instability evolution.

Effects of spatially-varying substrate anchoring on instabilities and dewetting of thin Nematic Liquid Crystal films