FLATPACK FILM FESTIVAL 10TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION FULL PROGRAMME LINE UP REVEALED
A one-of-a-kind film jamboree, the critically acclaimed Flatpack Film Festival returns to Birmingham to celebrate its tenth birthday with a jam-packed week of screenings, performances, installations and happenings with 137 events taking place at seventeen venues across the city.
Flatpack has grown in many interesting and wonderful directions from its birth as a short film night in a Digbeth pub. As co-founder and director Ian Francis says on this landmark year; “Flatpack has lost most of its baby fat, while we hope retaining traces of what made it so adorable in the first place. We’ve tried to keep rethinking things every year, trusting our instinct and listening to feedback. The biggest change over the past decade is how many more people have ownership of this strange and marvellous event, it’s a responsibility that we take seriously”
Running from 19th-24th April, and keeping a tighter focus on central Birmingham this year, you can expect the usual boundary-defying cinematic fun and games from this much-loved festival which encompasses film in all its forms. After many years of building a temporary festival home in Digbeth, this year’s Flatpack festival hub sees a slight change of scenery, located at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s beautiful Gas Hall. Converted into a multi-purpose hub fit for information finding, film-showing, diary-reading, creature-building and plenty more besides, the Gas Hall is home for numerous exhibitions and free daytime screenings, for people to sample the programme.
This year’s programme is bookended by two live re-scores to classic films, exploring the fantastic. Flatpack’s opening night (19 April, Adrian Boult Hall) is a unique presentation of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s atmospheric and mesmerising, Vampyr (1932) with an imaginative new live rescore by four piece multi-instrumentalists Minima and hugely talented film pianist Stephen Horne. Matt Eaton (Pram) and Gareth Jones (Misty’s Big Adventure) provide the live score soundtrack for Flatpack’s closing night screening of F.W.Murnau’s thrilling, expressionistic adaptation of Goethe’s Faust (1926) which shifts back and forth between demonic gothic horror and bucolic comedy (24 April, The Old Rep).
Right from its first edition Flatpack has been preoccupied with the marriage of film and music. This year’s new programme strand Optical Sound is hosted under one roof at the Birmingham and Midland Institute for a weekend of live soundtracks and A-V performances, screenings and events including new scores to Chris Marker’s existential time travel classic photo montage La Jeteé (22 April) re-scored by LARVA, and Giant Axe Field’s Thaumatos (22 April), an improvised audio-visual cut-up tribute to Georges Franju’s world of mystery and illusion, with footage from his Surrealist Judex (1963) and Nuits Rouges (1974). Mechanical magician Pierre Bastien has been making his own musical machinery for nearly 40 years creating textured looping soundscapes made up from various sources including Meccano parts, motors, fans and rattles. Bastien will present a special live performance at Flatpack on 23 April, reformulating his legendary Silent Motors set.
Photographer Richard Nicholson has been travelling the country, gaining privileged access to a realm most cinema-goers never venture, the projection box. As film has made way for digital, both the job and the work place have changed fundamentally, Richard’s beautifully detailed images on display at the Gas Hall capture this pivotal moment. Richard Nicholson: The Projectionists (20-24 April) is part of a wider research project at the University of Warwick on the changing role of the projectionist.
The legacy of pioneering art group Action Space is explored; an artists initiative founded in 1968 which saw enormous multi-coloured inflatables pop up in parks, council estates and shopping centres, where they were used as a stage for improvised performance, reaching people who wouldn’t dream of entering a gallery. One of the founder’s sons Huw Wahl, has recreated one of Action Space’s legendary inflatables which will set up home in Victoria Square for the final 3 days of the festival (22-24 April), functioning as a film-set, screening room, playground and performance space with a programme of talks and screenings, including the first chance to see a new film about the group. Drawing from a mountain of wonderful archive footage as well as testimonies from those involved, Action Space is a thought-provoking documentary asking questions that are just as relevant half a century on. How do children learn to manage risk and what we mean by community art and public spaces? (23 April, The Electric Cinema).
Blind Cinema (22 April, The Electric Cinema) is a unique piece devised by Belgian artist Britt Hatzius. As you enter the cinema you are blindfolded by a group of schoolchildren who describe a whispered narration to what they see on screen via an ear trumpet. Partly inspired by the art of audio description, the film Britt has made will never be seen by anyone other than herself and her young narrators, who will see it themselves for the first time.
From Ethiopian sci-fi to six-hour Portuguese epics via American biopics and memory bending thrillers, this year’s programme of Features offers a wide-ranging assortment of cinematic gems from around the world. Deniz Gamze Erguven’s debut Mustang (20 April, mac birmingham), features a fantastic a pearl of a score by Warren Ellis in a lyrical fable that pits adolescent sensuality against the patriarchal society of a quiet Black Sea village, and oddball Japanese fantasy Love and Peace from prolific filmmaker Sion Sono (24 April, The Electric Cinema).
Documentaries this year celebrate eccentric creativity, from documentaries on the Czech animator and Harryhausen contemporary Karel Zeman (Film Adventurer Karel Zeman, 19 April, The Electric Cinema); a Mumbai painter who elevates movie advertising to a fine art (Original Copy, 24 April, The Electric Cinema); NG83 (23 April, The Electric Cinema), a look back on the UK Hip Hop/Breakdancing explosion in the 80s, particularly in Nottingham, and Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten (22 April, Birmingham & Midland Institute) on the vibrant 60s/70s Cambodian music scene tragically cut short by the Khmer Rouge.
Fun for families and children of all ages Flatpack’s popular family strand Colour Box returns with a weekend of screenings and workshops offering plenty of opportunity for making and getting creative as well as seeing the best in animated world cinema (23-24 April, Gas Hall).
For more information please visit FlatpackFestival.org.uk
