Thursday 12th May 2011The Edge, 20:00-23:00Entry: Free
Those five days of film, music and delicious cakes have flown by for another year but for those of you who need more Flatpack Festivity in your life we have a Post-Apocalyptic Walk-In Movie; a night of training for the imminently unprepared on how to survive in a world laid bare. For one night only The Edge will be home to a Post-Apocalyptic Cinema screening the very best in wasteland punks and undisclosed global annihilations. And its all free! All you’ll need to get in is a Diesel Passport which you can pick up at any Diesel Store.
Tom Baker, of LOAF fame, will also be doing a workshop on foraging in the city (useful if you want to avoid Zombie crowded supermarkets) and the night will be played out to a dystopian soundtrack from a line up of resident DJ’s. You can bring along your own food, drinks and mercenary gangs - though we do ask that all weaponry be left outside the compound.
This is the list sent to me by Mordant Music of things they’ll need to construct Nesst 2, a WWII style pill box which will house the projector showing MisinforMation,their re-edits of public information films from the 1970s. The films have been treated to a new soundtrack of ambient electro music which is strangely affecting, alongside images of laser printers printing ‘EGG’ onto eggs, magpies robbing houses and kids sniffing glue. It makes you wonder how many budding art house film makers were bidding their time making public service information films during the 1970s.
Nesst 2 will be found in Zellig, the new wing of the Custard Factory. It opens on Thursday 24 March (17.30 – 19.00) and is then open 12.00 – 18.00 Friday 25 - Sunday 27 March.
Apologies are also due. We seem to have caused a shortage of pillow cases and double duvet covers in charity shops in the Birmingham area…
I’m Tegid, Festival Assistant. Over the last five months I have been doing everything from sourcing bed sheets to cover in concrete, finding places to park a Vintage Mobile Cinema to cycling round Brum distributing flyers! Here are a few things I’m most looking forward to:
Brent Green’s blend of stop-motion animation and live action is poetic, a little bit creepy and continually mesmerising. Based on the true story of Lag Wood, a man who builds a house in his back garden which he believes is a healing machine that can save the life of his girlfriend. Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then relies upon dream-logic to lull you through a complex story of loss and reconstruction.
Halfway between an animation and a film, a drama and a documentary Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then could come across as an exercise in filmic experimentation but at its heart is an attempt to understand a persons journey through grief, ‘I don’t understand how he saw how a lot of this stuff was gonna work. I think I do now, but when I was down there I couldn’t work out what the 23ft tower for a laundry room could possible do for someone’s life until you realise he was building up towards God.’ Dir. Brent Green.
It also features a beautiful soundtrack inspired by Lag Wood’s own recordings of ’crazy-people church music‘ and the Mid-West.
Celebrating the imminent departure of Pip, festival Co-Director for a career in midwifery, Busy Being Born is an array of films which look at how we come screaming, meowing and spinning into the world.
It’s also in this shorts segment that I’ll be taking an hour out of my assisting Flatpack to perform with MUTE - a jazz/folk/pop quartet who’ll be improvising to a silent 1940s documentary Private Life of a Cat. We improvise to silent films and add an extra element of risk by not watching the films we’re going to improvise to beforehand – expect strange harmonies and peculiar musical representations of cats. Not to be missed!
© Flatpack Festival 2010