Every festival has a few choice acts/films that don’t come off; the trick is to be thick-skinned and keep your options open. One of those that got away when planning this year’s Flatpack was British Sea Power, who we hoped to have up with their rescore of Robert Flaherty’s windswept documentary Man of Aran. The timing wasn’t quite right, but happily it’s all come together a few months later and BSP will be performing with the film at midnight on 21 August as part of a packed film-tent programme at the Green Man festival. Taking a lead from Flaherty’s film we’ll be showing an assortment of ‘edge-of-the-world’ movies including lunar shorts and cult documentary The Moon and The Sledgehammer (trailer below). More info on the whole thing here.

In the run-up to the launch of the Travelling Picture Show tour next month, I thought I’d start posting some of the featured shorts. This cubicle romance was nominated for an Oscar this year, and you might remember the director Konstantin Bronzit from his brilliant short Au Bout du Monde.

A couple of weeks ago we had a fab time Making Do at the New Art Gallery in Walsall. Here are some photos…

Images by Naz and Oona. With thanks to Ioannis Ioannou for inviting us. [Flickr]

Ok, so a few things have been sneaking up on here that we should draw your attention to…

TRAVELLING PICTURE SHOW
Project page for this summer’s kids tour, following a storming weekend of matinees at the Electric. Dates already booked in Bromsgrove, Brum, Pershore, Shrewsbury, and plenty more to come;

WORCESTERSHIRE ON FILM mk2
Worcester and Bretforton, lock up your granddaughters. Actually, don’t;

MAKING DO
Walsall knees-up on 7th May in tandem with Capsule and featuring Pram, July Skies, and the Winter League. And most imminently;

7INCH no.36
Back to the Hare and Hounds, with a crate of good short stuff and guest DJ Jonny Costello. Includes Jeff Keen’s cut-up comic-book overload MARVO MOVIE (pictured above, from the ace new BFI dvd set), a taster for Jo Hamilton’s tour diary GOWN (ditto, and vimeo’d here) and Lucy McLauchlan’s timelapse mural in TACIT (embedded below). Beyond the jump I’ve pasted this morning’s emailout - to receive these as nature intended, sign up on the left.

Beat13 / Lucy McLauchlan “Tacit” from Beat13 on Vimeo.

(more…)

At the last 7inch event we showed a brief clip from 1981 Indonesian horror flick Mystics in Bali, by way of a taster for a full screening at Flatpack in March. The response since has been so striking - ie, numerous people saying ‘what the hell was that?’, ‘you’ve infected my dreams’, etc - that we felt that we should spread the joy a little further. If you like the look of it, the dvd is available from Mondo Macabro. And this Thai advert for Sylvania lightbulbs is a handy primer on East Asian bogeymen:

This week a new show opened at the Ikon gallery. Darcy Lange: Work Studies in Schools gathers some of the reams and reams of video footage which New Zealand artist Lange shot on his visits to schools in Birmingham and Oxfordshire during 1976 and 77. As he went along he screened his work back to the pupils and teachers who he was filming, sparking off a dialogue about documentary and how the kids saw themselves being represented onscreen.

If you happen to make it down there, pop into the Ikon shop and you can pick up a copy of the Landmarks booklet which 7inch produced last year. This is a record of a project we did around another chronicler of Birmingham life, TV documentary maker Philip Donnellan. Although the two never worked together, they had a similar willingness to involve their subjects in the work they were making. (In fact, Donnellan got in trouble at the BBC for inviting some union employees he had filmed into the edit suite at Pebble Mill.) You can also download a pdf of the booklet from the Landmarks project page.

There were two full houses for the climax of our archive tour in Pershore and Worcester this weekend. A blow-by-blow account can be found in the photo diary. A big thank you to all the venues for their support, and to all the nice people who came along. Apologies to those who we had to turn away; if there are any extra screenings in the new year we’ll post the details here.

This little skit by Coventry-based animator Qianqian Liu was cooked up during the recent Digitoons masterclasses run by the Brothers McLeod. It has picked up nigh on 100,000 youtube views already (including the usual flood of considered and illuminating comments) and can also be seen at the Hare and Hounds this Sunday as part of the Housewives’ Choice night.

Our pitiless conquest of the media continued last week with a spot on Midlands Today about the Worcestershire on Film tour. Many thanks to all those who wrote in and pointed out that the footage included a couple of shots of Ludlow; please rest assured that all rogue Shropshire elements have been removed. And if you would like to catch the tour before it ends, can we recommend the screening in Pershore this Saturday 22 November at 2pm? Thanks to an on air plug from the BBC we are expecting a veritable swarm of people for the 7pm show the same day in Worcester - so if you want to avoid disappointment either get in the queue early, or get down to Number 8.

We reached the halfway point in our Worcestershire archive tour last week, with over 100 people coming along to the Priory in Great Malvern. The audience response has been brilliant, and for us jaded city kids it’s also been great to see the leaves turning throughout the month and discovering little shops and pubs along the way. A brief record of our voyage so far can be found on the projects page, and if you want to catch the tour we’re in Bretforton (nr Evesham) and Droitwich this week, then Pershore and Worcester next month.