This is part two of my Flatpack Film Festival preview guide covering Saturday. Part one detailed my plans for Friday and Sunday will follow soon. Again, these aren’t necessarily recommendations as I don’t really know what I’m letting myself in for in a lot of cases. But the programme is absurdly packed so you might find this useful.
I’ve already got my ticket for Mark Locke’s Saturday Night Takeaway (previewed here) which pretty much puts me in Moseley for the evening. This collection of clips and shorts will be presented in a chat-show format with Mark being interviewed by Adrian Goldberg (of The Stirrer) while Misty’s Big Adventure play live. No idea how that’s going to work but that’s kinda the point. It starts at 8.30 in the MAC (£4.50) and, I’m told, should run for a good 100 minutes.
Meanwhile, up the road at the Jug of Ale, the Capsule organised Known Unknowns event is taking place. Run by the folks behind the excellent Supersonic festival this features six bands (links here) and a variety of moving images plus DJs and cake taking over the entire pub. It’s a fiver to get in and runs from 7pm – 2am so my plan is to go there first for an hour, rush down to the MAC for Mark Locke and then come back around 10.30 for the last few hours. I’d imagine others will be thinking along the same lines too.
That pretty much rules out the films in the city centre venues. I’ll regret missing High Score, a documentary about the people who are still trying to beat the record scores for vintage arcade games. The high score for Missile Command is 80,000,000 points and requires the player to stand at the machine for 48 hours. Bill Carlton reckons he can beat it. Accompanying the film is a performance from the excellent ZX Spectrum Orchestra. Electric, 6.30pm, £6.
During the day the main draw for me is the Modulate Sound Space at at their 22 Green Street space in Digbeth (map). Run as a drop-in event the attractions take place “from within a yurt in the middle of the warehouse” and includes a screening of Her Noise, “A collection of interviews and live performance documentation… celebrating women whose contributions to art and culture are often overlooked”, including Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch. You can see it at 1pm and 4pm. Around this is a load of stuff that just looks intriguingly odd and well worth the £3.00 ticket considering it runs from 1-9pm.
At the Island Bar I’m drawn to Bibio + Artists Valley at 5.30: “Black Country-based musician/filmmaker Stephen Wilkinson is best known for two lps of gorgeously fuzzy finger-picking electronica under the name Bibio. This evening he and fellow Artists Valley cohorts will be laying on a tasty platter of film and music to freshen up jaded urban palates.”
At the Electric during the day the following caught my eye:
Channel 2 Shorts (noon, £6) is a collection of “sort-of documentaries” comprising the more personal and observations pieces submitted to the festival. More details at the link.
Interkosmos (2pm, £6) looks kinda mad being a lo-fi sci-fi film documenting an imaginary East German space mission in the 1970s. “Filmmaker and visual artist Jim Finn weaves a wonderful patchwork of clunky newsreel, stop-frame animation and Berkeley-esque musical numbers” along with a krautrock-esque soundtrack.
Finally, Kyle (4pm, £6) is a feature by John Bradburn from Redditch, filmed in DV with non-professional actors in the Bull Ring markets and estates in Kings Norton. “The result is a bold and engaging piece of work with an acknowledged debt to the likes of Herzog and the Dardennes but a sensibility all of its own.”
Assuming I survive all that, Sunday beckons and looks to be quite ridiculous. More later.