Flatpack Festival opens new world of experiences

Mar 8 2009 by Anna Blackaby, Birmingham Post

Birmingham this week plays host to a unique film festival where shop-window installations, Edwardian-themed cinemas in disused warehouses and pedal-powered phenakistoscopes will pop up all over the city centre and Digbeth.

This year’s Flatpack Festival, the nationally-renowned annual film festival produced by Birmingham-based 7 Inch Cinema, will run over five days from Wednesday to Saturday and is set to attract visitors from all over the United Kingdom to experience its huge variety of screenings, talks and other film-related events.

After describing the event as “a film festival which thinks it is a music festival,” Pip McKnight, co-director of 7 Inch Cinema, said one of the appeals of Flatpack was that the adventurous selection on offer meant it did not feel like an industry event.

“It’s like Glastonbury, where you might have a big act like Oasis playing but the really interesting stuff is on the smaller stages,” she said.

Among the many unusual attractions Flatpack offers this year is a screening of early footage of exotic locations, first shown by Birmingham promotor Waller Jeffs in the early-1900s, given a modern twist with a live score by local 15-piece band The Destroyers at the Town Hall.

Meanwhile in Digbeth, an old industrial building at 104 Floodgate Street will be transformed into Floodgate Kino, a temporary 250-seat cinema done up in the style of an Edwardian gentleman’s club complete with bar and cake shop.

Floodgate Kino will also provide a home for a pedal-powered phenakistoscope, an early optical device consisting of a bicycle, a cinema seat, a mirror and a large rotating disk.

Ian Francis, co-director of 7 Inch Cinema, said: “It’s about people using limited resources in imaginative ways. The vision of Flatpack is to create a sense of occasion so that film is something unique - so that it is an adventure and not just the familiar experience that a lot of cinemas can be.”

“We work hard not to just end up using lots of cinemas, not that we have anything against cinemas - we work with places like The Electric, for example - but it changes the experience of the audience to be somewhere different.”

The festival began last week with a shop-window installation trail featuring work by students and alumni of Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, who were asked to propose installation ideas inspired by the festival.

As part of the trail, strange objects and images appeared in shop windows in the city centre and Digbeth, including Urban Outfitters, Nostalgia Comics and COW Vintage. Mr Francis said it was a conscious decision to spread the festival out over a variety of locations, many of them in Digbeth.

“By bringing the different venues together, it lays Digbeth out on a plate so people can explore all these different spaces. Visually, it’s really striking and it’s close to the city centre but it feels very different,” he said.

Around 25 per cent of the 5,000 admissions Flatpack is expecting this year will come from outside the region, a figure the organisers are hoping to increase to 50 per cent as the festival continues to build a name for itself on a national level.

Mr Francis said: “People see there is something exciting going on and they want to be a part of it but it was important for us to build up from a Birmingham audience. It’s not a question of going to the rest of the world and shouting how great we are.

“It’s something that has got a real groundswell of support here and that translates through to a national level.”

Many of the events focus on West Midland heritage, such as a 1965 documentary about John Madin, the architect of Birmingham’s Central Library, the future of which still hangs in the balance as debate rages over whether its architectural and historic merits justify it being retained as a city landmark.

Another event sees the screening of The Song Remains the Same, a classic documentary of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 Houses of the Holy tour accompanied by a talk by music journalist Chris Phipps. The event is organised in conjunction with Birmingham-based music promoters Capsule as part of its Home of Metal project celebrating the region’s heavy metal heritage.

Ms McKnight said: “It’s something that national audience and press respond to - it’s not just local history, it’s nationally important history.”