A collaboration between Balsall Heath Local History Society and MACE‘s ‘Full Circle’ Project. Digital Balsall Heath aims to:

record the life and times of people living in Balsall Heath and Highgate

Flagged up by the Friends of Moseley Road Baths.

So news of next years Flatpack Festival has arrived, and it looks like there are a few treats in store. Along with their usual eclectic mix of film, animation, prize-winning documentaries, multi-media performance and interactive projections, they’re got a few novelties up their sleves.

The promise of a 22 seater vintage mobile cinema, a Friday night Drive-In, live scores and late night parties sounds like a pretty exciting prospect to me.

Personally i’m looking forward to catching this perfectly restored 1960’s Vintage Mobile Cinema which will be touring the city screening a range of shorts, home-movies and archive clips.

Following the success of this years Invisible Cinema tour of original 1930s art deco Odeons, 2011 will uncover more of Birmingham’s finest cinema heritage, including ex-picturehouses and forgotten celluloid landmarks. They also have an exhibition of images from disused cinemas planned.

Here’s a few other things they’ve got lined up;

Prostitute – on the eve of its re-release, Tony Garnett revisits his 1980 drama Prostitute, partly shot in Balsall Heath, a few years before community action shut down the local red light district.

Loft in Translation – screenings in partnership with MACE’s Full Circle project, which encourages people to retrieve home-movies from their attics.

Archive Revival – Artists and filmmakers who appropriate and repurpose archive material including work by Thom Andersen, Duncan Campbell and Peter Tscherkassky.

Other confirmations – 1992 video diary In Bed With Chris Needham, a vivid snapshot of an adolescent metalhead in Loughborough; the UK premiere of Shadow Shows, an experiment in surreal horror created by Pram and Film Ficciones; and Every Minute Always, an immersive sound piece using headsets in a cinema, inspired by Brief Encounter.

The full programme will be announced in February 2011, so keep an eye on their website and blog for more updates.

MACE (Media Archive for Central England) are currently working on The Full Circle Project, which will run for 3 years as they hunt down hidden or forgotten film footage and home-movies from the past 100 years, created by people of the Midlands.

The aim is to make these materials accessible to the community so that they can be widely enjoyed by future generations and used for research, in exhibitions, screenings and education work.

Our concern at MACE is that films and videos are disappearing fast.  We want to stem the tide by working with organisations across the midlands to help them find and ‘save’ their local community’s moving image heritage.

For more information on the Full Circle Project, contact Mace or visit their website / blog for full details on what they do with donated film, and the local organisations involved.