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Flatpack Festival 2011

Festival smestival, festivals are just marketing exercises where the same shit as normal is glossily repackaged and the “vibe” is some flyers. Not when they’re painstakingly and artistically curated by a team that manage to make Birmingham the centre of the film world for a week each year. Go Flatpack. Including ‘The Secret History of Birmingham‘ on Sunday: “The screening will include Miracles Take A Little Longer, a film about Birmingham’s reconstruction which includes brilliant colour footage from the post-war period and narration by Frank Bough. We’ll also have some marvellous amateur cine footage of Bournville from the 1950s.”

Flatpack – part of the furniture

Brum’s (perhaps the World’s) best film festival starts today — I’m off to the Stephen Duffy film on Sunday at least. But here’s some recommendations from other people Danny Smith (more here): “Down Terrace – Friday 26 march Normally I stay away from anything that even resembles a kitchen sink drama having been inoculated against the allure of grey bleak humanity by growing up in a house with EastEnders on every single day. But when you introduce Ben Wheatly (him what did Ideal and Modern Toss) and tense crime plot then I have to say I’m a little more than intrigued.” & PixieSixer from More Canals…: “Short Film Triple-Bill at VIVID on Thursday 25 March (6-10.30pm). With a selection of regionally made animated shorts, highlights from Shooting People’s Shooters Film of the Month competition, and an assortment of music videos and other shorts from London’s only weekly short film evening, Short and Sweet, it is sure to be a highly entertaining evening jam-packed with creative audiovisual goodness. And, what’s more, it’s free!” If you’ve got any yourself I’m sure we’d be glad to hear them.

Flatpack Blog

Eleanor McKeown from Electric Sheep, a quarterly cinema magazine published from London, is blogging loads of Flatpack stuff. Seeing Brum from the outsider's point of view too, it's a really good read. She's even staying at the back-to-backs.

No screws missing

The Flatpack festival properly launches this evening (Wednesday) with a Curzonora extravaganza at the Town Hall. I’ll let the programme explain: “Birmingham, 1901. Electric trams are making their debut on the Bristol Road, councillors are plotting to bring water all the way from Wales, and at the Curzon Hall in Suffolk Street a showman named Waller Jeffs has just begun his first season of animated pictures in the city. Two shows a day, with as many as 3,000 punters per show marvelling at scenes of comedy and romance, the exotic and the mundane, accompanied by live music, sound-effects and performing animals. Within ten years he will be a Birmingham institution, but the audiences who have discovered film at ‘Curzonora’ will desert him as full-time cinemas arrive on the scene.” Flatpack Festival 09 trailer from Dave Gaskarth on Vimeo.

The wonderful Flatpack festival has sort of started, sort of. Although the proper launch of actual screenings you go to is not until the 11th, there’s a sort of “retail outreach programme” going on right now that should bring film and the festival to more people. Five pieces of filmic artwork have been installed in shop windows around the City Centre, and they’ll be showing now for the duration of the fest (that’s until the 16th of March). The works are in Urban Outfitters (lovely Vaudeville work by Chris & Kier), Up and Running (Temple Street, a clever animation I couldn’t see well for the throng of viewers), Nostalgia and Comics, the big yellow second hand clothes shop in Digbeth (it’s called Cow, who knew?) and personal favourite the film(s) by Rill Marchant in ‘a too’ on Ethel St. Nepotistically, Rill’s ‘Dead Air’ is my favourite — but not just because our telly is one of those in the shop window — it makes great use of the intallation by having separate looping films that will cross and mesh to produce a different narative with each watch. It’s also got a noir-ish vibe and a maneki neko in it,...

You don’t have to be posh to see Privilege

The Flatpack Festival draws out another gem with a screening of Privilege — on 16mm at Ikon Eastside on Sunday 15 March. The film is a 1967 exploration of the power of fame, and has depth and darkness not quite communicated in the poster: Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch! Steven Shorter is a pop phenomenon, and his management use him to further all sorts of causes. So far so real — but this pop star is from Birmingham. And the film was shot in part in Brum, including at St Andrews. Not to be missed. There’s parallels here with Slade’s master-work Slade in Flame, but that disappointingly was shot oop north as Dudley’s grit wasn’t quite filmic enough.

Flatpack Festival Programme Now Online

The Flatpack Festival programme is now online: "Hello there. If you were searching for furniture, this is probably the wrong place. But if you were after five days of unique film events in venues all over Birmingham from 11-15 March 2009, then make yourself at home."

Flatpack 2009 – Trailers

These are my links for 29 th January from 12:20 to 12:20

Wanted: Male and Female Actors

Here's an opportunity to star in a short film being shown 2009 Flatpack Film Festival. The work will be installed into a shop window in the city centre as part of the Festival Film Trail in March.

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Birmingham's emotional wellbeing* on Saturday 11th of February 2012 13:22: 60.9 % (okay)