**Stop press**
Just confirmed that Gruff Rhys and Dyl ‘Goch’ Jones will be at the Green Man Festival this weekend to talk about Separado!, the documentary they made together about Gruff’s long-lost relative. René Griffiths is a poncho-wearing, Welsh-singing troubadour from Patagonia, whose story inspired Rhys to trace the historical links between Wales and the Argentinian badlands where many of his ancestors emigrated in the 19th century. The film is a real charmer which throws spaghetti western, Celtic dance and super 8 into the mix, so if you’re at Green Man get down to the film tent! It’s showing on Friday at 7:30pm, and full info on the 7inch Friday night lineup is here. The festival has sold out but the film is also showing in plenty of other UK cinemas during the next couple of months, and a DVD is in the works.

PS: Regular Birmingham viewers, please note that the film is back at the Electric from 20-24 August.

Stan Morgan worked at BBC Birmingham for over 20 years, a scene hand on the likes of Boys From the Blackstuff and All Creatures Great and Small. After he left he retrained in photography at Wolverhampton University, and then returned to Pebble Mill shortly before the building closed down to capture these behind-the-scenes shots. My abiding memory of the place is that it felt a bit like a polytechnic, so it’s nice to see shots of the Archers studio looking like a shabby 70s seminar room. A selection of the images will be on show next to the cinema at mac, alongside the aforementioned weekend of drama delights.

Stan died last year. His son Stephen took the portrait above and is keeping the photography flame flying. He has a show opening next week at the Wapping Project Bankside in London.

Images by Stan Morgan courtesy of Birmingham Library and Archive Services.

It was very sad to hear of Alan Plater’s passing last week. A writer with a brilliant ear for dialogue whose theatre and TV career spanned over 40 years, and a lovely man by all accounts. I first discovered him as a kid because my dad was obsessed with The Beiderbecke Affair, and A Very British Coup is also well worth digging up on DVD. If you’ve got an hour to spare there’s an extensive interview with him at the British Library’s Theatre Archive project.

Alan Plater had a long association with BBC Birmingham, and you can see two of the films he wrote for them at mac this weekend. The first, Land Of Green Ginger, is a 1973 Play For Today which used an evocative Hull street name for its title. It was the first time Plater had been given free rein to to write a film set in his hometown, and includes choice lines like “Bugger shopping. I was only going for a bag of sugar and a bit of scandal.” The second was made over thirty years later and has another distinctive title: The Last Will and Testament of Billy Two Sheds. It stars Likely Lad and Beiderbecke collaborator James Bolam, and was filmed on Birmingham allotments. The producers of both films, David Rose and Will Trotter, will be present at the screenings.

Alan Plater (15 April 1935 – 25 June 2010)

Supposedly it’s our quiet time, but there’s loads going on. Including…

> 7INCH no.38 – Old-school gaming special
Hare and Hounds, Sunday 27 June

> IT CAME FROM PEBBLE MILL – 70s drama extravaganza
MAC, 2-4 July

> GREEN MAN FESTIVAL – big-top fun
Glanusk Park, 20-22 August

Plus other possible August gigs at the Big Chill and in Manchester shaping up, more on which shortly, and I’m making a slight return to academia to give a paper on ‘cinema’s ongoing love affair with its own demise’, in Leicester in July. And remarkably enough we’ve been nominated for the Hospital 100, an annual run-down on creative Britain’s ones to watch. Make our mums proud, and chuck us your vote!

Yesterday I drove to London to pick up two hefty black boxes which contain The Mobile Cinema, starring at the Hare and Hounds this Tuesday. The word ‘Mobile’ is used quite loosely here. Although Romana Schmalisch, the artist who created it, has carted this contraption around Europe I imagine she risked life and hernia to do so.

The inspiration for The Mobile Cinema came from The New Moscow, a 1938 urban planning comedy made by Aleksandr Medvedkin. It tells the tale of an idealistic young designer who treks into the capital from Siberia to present his utopian model for a new city, a table-top diorama with intricate moving parts which have a tendency to malfunction at the wrong moment. Earlier Medvedkin had been involved in the kino-train movement, when revolutionary ideals were transported across the USSR using trains converted into cinemas and film production units, and all of this history and plenty more besides has been stirred into the mix of Schmalisch’s performance.

The Mobile Cinema can also be seen throughout June in Nottingham, Norwich and all over Scotland.

Alongside Tim Burton, Kate Beckinsale and Shekhar Kapur there’s a chair on this year’s Cannes jury reserved for Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi – but no one’s likely to be offended if he doesn’t show up. The Cannes invitation was extended as a gesture of solidarity towards Panahi, who has been under arrest since 1st March. It isn’t fully clear what he’s been charged with, but some reports have mentioned allegations that he was making an anti-government film in his home. Over the next few days there are scores of screenings of Panahi’s films going on around the world, and as a small Birmingham contribution we’re putting on his 2006 World Cup docudrama Offside at Maison Mayci in Moseley on Wednesday. (It’ll probably be busy, so show up a little before 7 if you want to see it.) Elsewhere in the UK, there are screenings on Tuesday at the Star and Shadow in Newcastle and the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. Here are a few links for further info:

Free Panahi facebook page and twitter feed;
iranhumanrights.org report on his condition;
Huffington Post writeup

This is the same Jafar Panahi who was held in handcuffs and leg-irons by US immigration officials at JFK airport in 2001. Who’d be an Iranian filmmaker?

Here are some of the images created on Alex Mackenzie’s rayogram workshops while he was in the UK recently, including a few made at VIVID on 15th November. (No sound.)

Endless film-hunting for Flatpack at the moment, and this was a nice smack in the face this afternoon. (Gracias to Cartoon Brew.)

As usual at this time of year our blogging and listings have tailed off horribly. If we weren’t so distracted we’d be telling you about stuff like the Endless Supply film screening in Digbeth tomorrow, or maybe even our own gig on Sunday.

A couple of blurrycam shots from last night’s Wooden Lightbox performance by Alex MacKenzie at Vivid. During their flying visit we were able to introduce Alex and his partner Clare to the joys of the Bartons Arms, and on their return to Vancouver they’ll be informing the local elders that any self-respecting World-class City™ must have a German christmas market and ferris wheel. (Though I think they probably do free concerts better over there.) In the meantime you can catch the show in London, Bristol, Glasgow or Oban. Recommended.

Hitching a ride with the Travelling Picture Show throughout the summer, animator Claire Evans has been making a ‘chain-film’ with young people all over the Midlands. Here’s a silent extract from the Hereford bit; the full film complete with spooky soundtrack will be showing at our gala finale on Sunday.

magic box hereford from themagicbox on Vimeo.