This year we are sharing a hub with Fierce festival. Best known as the home of VIVID, for the duration of Fierce and Flatpack the space (on the corner of Heath Mill Lane and Fazeley Street) will become The Dirty End. It will be the perfect place to pick up information, see free films, talks and relax. We will also be serving a range of hot food and sweet things throughout the festival:
Squisito, exponents of the Slow Food movement and purveyors of locally made Italian food will be providing hot food for the festival. There will be succulent meatballs, roasted vegetables, funky focaccias, sumptuous soups and salads.
Delicious treats changing daily will be provided by The Boutique Baking Company- Biscuits, cupcakes and unusual cakes. Does Rhubarb Crumble Kuchen, Brazilian Bolo Cake or Spiced Chai Tea Cake tickle your fancy?
There will also be daily decadent ‘Curated Cakes’ courtesy of gastronomic rule-benders Companis. They will be in charge of the Big Jugs Cocktail Hour, serving exotic cocktails from 5-7pm on Friday 25 and Sunday 27 March.
The Fierce Festival website is now live! Happening across Birmingham at the same time as Flatpack, it promises spectacular performances and public interventions. The second city will be buzzing next week!
The Studio @ Fairbridge is a new creative space in the Digbeth area. Located at 79 Warwick Street, it is a renovated photography studio next to the Fairbridge Charity which works with young people to gain skills and confidence in order to change their lives. For their first show, the space will host Mothwasp at Flatpack, a stunning live audio-visual show; sci-fi ambience meets video nasty.
In readiness for its opening, last week artist Lucy McLauchlan and a volunteer from the charity worked to transform the exterior of the building with her beautifully constructed murals. You can see more photographs from the installation at EC-Arts.
If you like the sound of Mothwasp why don’t you check out Shadow Shows - surreal horror featuring live music from Pram, vintage footage mash-ups from The Keystone Cut Ups and re-scored public information films in the bunker installation Nesst 2.
Hello! *waves* My name is Annabel and I am Marketing Assistant for the festival. During the festival itself I will be tweeting, blogging and adding fun things to the facebook page. I’ll be the one in a corner with her face lit up by a laptop and tapping furiously on the keyboard. Please come and say hello!
There is so much happening at Flatpack this year. In the next week or so we will be introducing the festival team and sharing some of the events and screenings we are most looking forward to. Here are a few of my highlights:
A headphone performance for two people taking place at the Electric, the piece is named after the famous quotation from Brief Encounter: ‘I want to remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days’. From your cinema seat participants will be guided into a rich and sonically transporting world of cinematic perspective with a growing awareness of the relationship between each other. It sounds absolutely magical.
If this tickles your fancy you may also like… Lundahl & Seitl’sSymphony of a Missing Room taking place at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery as part of Fierce Festival. Using headphones and help from the performers, participants are led through the building for a very personal journey revealing new perceptions about the self, time and space we inhabit.
Too Much Information
Having studied animation I love seeing what’s new. I was recently blown away by BAFTA winning The Eagleman Stag (how on earth was it made?!) which will be screened, as well as David O’Reilly’s new film The External World. I love David’s dark short Please Say Something which was shown at Flatpack two years ago.
Continuing the strong archive theme through the festival this year, collaborators People Like Us and Ergo Phizmiz present a beautiful kaleidoscopic split-screen mash-up through silent cinema. The perfect Sunday evening in my opinion. Ergo Phizmiz has been described as a British Zappa or a musical equivalent to Chris Morris so expect a great original soundtrack too!
In Birmingham you can find them in our venues: mac, Ikon Gallery, VIVID, The Victoria, as well as Birmingham Central Library and Tourist Information Centres.
Colour Box, Flatpack’s programme for children and families will take place at mac this year over the festival weekend (26-27 March).
Treats include the award-winning animated uplifting feature Eleanor’s Secret about the power of books. There will also be another chance to see the recent adaptation of Fantastic Mr Fox on the big screen. Chris Bowden from ingenious puppet-makers MacKinnon & Saunders will be on hand to show how the puppets were created. Several versions of the same character were needed so the team ended up making over 500 puppets for the film!
There will be two shorts programmes this year, one aimed for those 4 and upwards, and one for those who are slightly older. As usual the screenings will be packed with all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures and things, including the beautiful Whistleless above.
There will be plenty to do outside of the cinema with interactive projections and a chance to turn yourself into an animated avatar. There will also be a chance to contribute to the longest film in Britain with the team from Unravel. They have been touring the country setting up free film-painting workshops in order to produce a sixteen-hour epic. Drop in to do a bit of painting, stencilling or scratching!
As well as all this on Sunday 27 March a vintage mobile cinema will be visiting mac with an array of shorts and cartoons!
Festival hub launch – This year’s joint Flatpack and Fierce festival hub at VIVID will, for the duration of the week, be re-named The Dirty End. The hub will host a café, performances, screenings and resident artists from both festivals throughout the week.
Shadow Shows – The official festival opening is the first UK performance of an immersive piece using sound and projections, devised by Pram and Film Ficciones. Followed by a knees-up at the Victoria.
Digging for Gold – As part of a celebration of Birmingham-born archivist Iris Barry, a selection of classic silent cinema including Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr, with live accompaniment by Nigel Ogden (The Organist Entertains). Tickets are already available from the Town Hall website here.
We Don’t Care About Music Anyway + Sakamoto Hiromichi -Documentary about Japan’s experimental music scene, followed by a live performance by one of the film’s stars. Sakamoto Hiromichi takes cello-playing in unexpected directions using saws and angle-grinders.
Ra! Ra! Ra! – An evening of music and visuals devoted to the cosmic voyages of Sun Ra, presented by Grandmaster Gareth and Outer Sight.
Saturday 26 March, 8.30pm at Ikon Eastside –
In Bed With Chris Needham As part of the buildup to Home of Metal, a legendary video diary from 1992 filmed by a teenage metalhead in Loughborough.
Saturday 26 March, from 9pm at VIVID
Paper Party – The follow-up to last year’s Plasticine Party will feature live performances by Sculpture and Origamibiro, new VJ set from animator David Wilson and plenty of paper based antics.
The weekend before last I visited Ikon Gallery to take part in the Unravel film project. It is a true epic that will create a hand painted film that correlates in length with the 874 miles between John O’Groats and Land’s End (each metre between the two places is seen as a ratio to equal one frame of 16mm film). I was told that seven hours of film have been made so far.
It was a wonderful family-friendly, hands-on workshop with all ages drawing with pens, using stickers and Letraset to produce their own few seconds of film. Visitors were also encouraged to try live film making, drawing directly onto the film whilst it ran through the projector. The results were busy and colourful, very much like the films of Len Lye (which Ikon happen to be showing as part of their current retrospective of the artist).
The screening of all the footage made in the session was packed to the gunwales. Just under ten minutes of film was produced on the day.The lovely film above was made by James Dyer on Unravel’s visit to the University of Huddersfield in December and shows some of the footage made in that workshop.
Unravel will be part of this year’s Colour Box, our film strand for kids at mac over the Flatpack weekend (26-27 March).
Len Lye: The Body Electric at Ikon Gallery runs until Sunday 13 February and is highly recommended.
© Flatpack Festival 2010