I’m doing a bit of moonlighting this week, writing press releases for Moseley Folk fest at the end of August. One of their guests on the Sunday afternoon is Ian Campbell, father of Ali and Robin from UB40 and a godfather of Birmingham’s folk scene. Back in the 60s his Jug O’ Punch folk club round the back of Digbeth Civic Hall (now the Barfly) gathered all the big names on the revival circuit - including Paul Simon, who went on to cover Campbell’s ‘The Sun is Burning’. The club helped to spawn the Red Lion folk club in Kings Heath, which is still going strong today and pays host to Peggy Seeger and assorted Watersons this Saturday. Big events like last month’s Town Hall sell-out English Originals and Moseley Folk owe a lot to these smaller pub promoters, who kept the folk circuit ticking over through many years of unfashionability.

Anyway, all of this is obviously a very roundabout way of plugging the final event in our spring season. Also jumping on the folk bandwagon, on Sunday 18 May 7inch will be screening a lovely 1965 film about the Watersons; Travelling For a Living. The director Derrick Knight will be up to introduce the film, and you can read a wee interview we did with him here.

After enduring the horrors of Nim’s Island this weekend I turned to the web in search of some hope for childrens cinema. There are plenty of folks out there rightly lamenting the narrow choice on offer in the UK, although on the education front the launch of Film Club looks promising in terms of getting a wider range of movies into schools and giving teachers plenty of autonomy in choosing their own programme. (A lot of film ed in this country has been heavily studio-driven in the past with compulsory St Trinians goodie-bags etc.) Teacher friends have spoken with religious zeal about the effects that careful use of Google Video/YouTube can have on their pupils, and the podcasts on the Teaching for the Future blog are very much pushing in that direction. What would be really handy is more places gathering relevant material, particularly short material, under curriculum-related headings. 

For more casual home viewing some great stuff can be found at Bangazee, a nice varied selection of youtube clips compiled by one half of Stratford-based animation duo the Brothers McLeod. ‘Vinni Puh’ goes down particularly well in these parts (below). Or if you’re feeling ambitious the now-dormant but still-useful Alternative Films for Kids has loads of suggestions from a parent who is obviously quite happy to twist her offspring’s melons now and again (including classic Saturday morning fare like Samuel Beckett). On the multiplex horizon, auteur types Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr Fox) and Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are) seem to be mellowing with age and doing one for the kids, and Michel Ocelot’s Prince’s Quest arrives here on DVD in a couple of months.  Any other hot tips to rescue us from Nim II would be much appreciated…

Although it’s a couple of weeks late, we felt we should mark the passing of one of British horror’s finest purveyors of the heaving bodice. Hazel Court was born in Sutton Coldfield in 1926 (though this Independent obit seems to think it was Birmingham), and after getting a break at the Rep went on to various post-war melodramas before making her name on the Hammer films. Her finest hour was having her throat ripped out by a falcon in the glorious Masque of the Red Death, a film which London folk can see tonight at the Curzon Soho being introduced by Roger Corman. Afer that she concentrated on having kids and being a sculptor and died aged 82 on 15 April 2008.

(While on the subject, I have to confess to a certain morbid love of trawling the Independent’s obituary section. Amazing who you find there. ‘You’ll never guess who’s dead’, as they say in rural Ireland.)

Just a heads-up to let you know - should you care about such things - that ‘Telly Savalas and the Quota Quickies‘ is on Radio 4’s Listen Again page for a couple more days.

With superstar DJs no longer a guaranteed crowd-puller, clubnights are increasingly using films as a little extra something on the bill. Three examples coming up in Digbeth over the next couple of weeks:

> ‘Part of the Weekend Never Dies‘, a documentary about Belgium’s Soulwax outfit as part of their tour pitching up at the Custard Factory this Saturday;

> a ’21st Century Remix’ of epic Bollywood tearjerker Mother India (pictured) at the opening night of Drop Beats Not Bombs;

> and on May 10th DJ Yoda’s Magic Cinema Show, which is basically him cutting up lots of clips using Pioneer’s DVJ kit.

This video for ‘Florida’ by Diplo was made by Brum director Ben Lister with Warblefly productions in the wild woods of Warwickshire. We’ve added it to our pixilation collection, and will be showing it nice and big on Sunday evening.

(More info/higher res fillum here, and although I’m getting a bit tired of all this interweb pop idol nonsense you can vote for the video in the animation section of the Clipstar awards.)

**Update** - we’ve taken the flash player off because it was messing with some people’s browsers. Go see it here instead, or on the Radar site…

By way of a warm-up act for I For India on Sunday we’ll be showing a small selection from the Living Room Cinema dvd, recently put out by the Center for Home Movies. This is a group of enthusiastic archivists who promote the worldwide Home Movie Day where anyone can show up and share their old cine footage (next one on 18th October 2008). As well as raising awareness of film preservation they have harvested some of the best for this compilation, which kicks off with a rare colour clip of Thomas Edison and includes wobblycam gems from Chicago and New York to Havana and Nagoya. Watching two hours of other people’s home-movies may not be your idea of a dream night in, but it’s strange how moving the mundane can become with time.

“Home movies turn minuses into pluses. Since so many are irretrievably lost, we cherish those that remain and yearn for those that we have not yet found. Of this desire histories are made. And since often we can only infer their context from fleeting visual clues, home movies pique our imagination. Imagining their backstories turns a void into art.”

- archivist Rick Prelinger, from the Living Room Cinema sleeve notes (some lovely home movies can also be downloaded from Prelinger’s collection at archive.org). One of our favourites on the dvd is the Rosenblatt wedding, wonderful shots from 1945 of a group of young deaf people letting rip on the dancefloor with insightful commentary by the newly-wed couple’s son 60 years later.

Went to the Cineworld Haymarket in London on Friday, currently bedecked with bunting and balloons for a stage version of Brief Encounter by Kneehigh Theatre. This started life at the Birmingham Rep (there had to be a Birmingham link somewhere, didn’t there?), but being almost completely ignorant of theatre we only just clocked it. What a show. It was the promise of clever film/performance tricks that pulled us in, and there were a few of those; it opens Purple Rose of Cairo style, with the heroine Laura jumping into the screen, and ends with an amazing train effect. But most of it is just ten actors and musicians working their arses off and having so much fun that the audience gets yanked along. We won’t start writing gushy reviews here; this Variety writeup gives you a fair idea of what to expect. £40 tickets, and worth every penny. Just smuggle in your own gin and tonic, theirs are rubbish and cost £7.

(And yes, this is the blogging honeymoon. Posting is guaranteed to slow down to a trickle in a couple of weeks.)

I remember back in the day - about 8 years ago - when we first started doing an event called Burdzeye at the Custard Factory. (Hopefully we’ve got better at coming up with names since then.) Fix Film Club was still around but that was about it, and someone even rang up to say ‘that was my idea, I was going to do a filmnight.’ Birmingham was very much a one- or two-filmnight kind of town.

Fastforward, and they’re everywhere. Last week, the Local Shorts Club. Tonight, the launch of a new AV night at Concrete in the jewellery quarter, and on Monday the Spotted Dog in Digbeth hosts a regular Irish Filum Night. Then next Sunday there’s us, plus Shorts on Walls, a new animator’s get-together the following night at the Rainbow. You’ve also got the occasional Monosin Short Film Festival (more of a night than a festival), until recently the Screen Test events at mac and from May a new season of screenings and events at the library theatre in town. And probably loads of others. They’re all doing quite different things, and all building audiences for different kinds of film. They’re egged on by cheaper kit, the marketing/programming power of the internet - and the increasingly limited choice in our cinemas. At least people are taking things into their own hands though. We may get misty-eyed about the days of latenight projector-battles, tussling over corners like dealers in The Wire, but on the whole this seems like a healthier scene.

Just added a brief interview with Sandhya Suri, director of I For India. Here’s a snippet:

“Like most film-makers I am simultaneously excited by and worried about the digital revolution. At the beginning I think I was more worried. Things were less clear, everybody seemed to be picking up a camera and we feared that respect for the craft may also fly out the window. However, as this becomes an ever stronger reality, I am more excited, particularly in terms of distribution and the possibility that it gives us as film-makers; to lead a decent, paid, honest life that others do, cutting out the middlemen who take all our money after years of hard work when the film finally gets distributed (if you are that lucky). So, I am interested in using the ‘digital revolution’ to find my audiences and get to them directly.”

We’ll be showing the film at the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath on Sunday 27 April.