Unfortunately we won’t be able to make this, what with a festival to organise, but you might be interested to know that Mike Figgis is up in Birmingham on 12 March as part of a series of talks called Boilerhouse Voices in the Jewellery Quarter. There’s a very good chance that he’ll be talking about digital film-making and seismic changes in the distribution and consumption of film. Tickets are £15.

During the 1970s Figgis performed at Birmingham Arts Lab as a member of experimental theatre troupe The People Show. The People Show is still going today, and their site has a nice archive of the old shows.

We moaned at them for not having a website, so it’s only fair that we toast the arrival of Birmingham International Film Society online. Looks nice too. Their last show before the Christmas break is Bahman Ghobadi’s Half Moon, about a Kurdish musician attempting to play a gig in Iraq after 35 years in exile. [spanish trailer]

This morning I dragged myself away from several deadlines to go and hear Osbert Parker talk about his animation at the Flip Festival, and I’m so glad I did. The cliche about animators is that they’re monosyllabic and prefer to express themselves by moving bits of paper around. Parker does a lot of that but he can also talk with real pzazz and insight about the process behind his work. He started out in graphic design, and showed a stack of images from his sketchbooks which made it clear that he still thinks like a designer in some ways and researches the hell out of everything he does. Reversing the usual progression he went straight from college to an MTV ident and lots of juicy ad commissions (many of which can be seen here), and it was over ten years until he started working on personal projects like Film Noir and Yours Truly. Through these films he established a signature style which involves turning bits of live-action footage into cut-out animation – spending insane amounts of time on stuff like cutting out little Humphrey Bogarts with a scalpel, placing them in a toy car and spritzing with water. Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film uses a similar origami approach but although the effect is amazing it’s more of a set-piece technique-fest for me, while Yours Truly skewers the audience with story-telling. Here’s hoping he gets his creepy mixed-media kids feature off the ground!
PS: Quiet Earth review.

Flip Animation Festival is on in Wolverhampton this week, and includes one of the first UK screenings of Nina Paley’s debut feature Sita Sings the Blues. Paley is a comic strip artist who moved into filmmaking ten years ago, and spent the last five animating Sita on her home computer. Inspired by the Ramayana, the film concerns the parallel man-troubles of Sita (in India’s mythical past) and Nina (in contemporary America), with musical backup from 20s songstress Annette Hanshaw. The director’s blog details some of the copyright hassles Hanshaw’s music has encountered as well as the film’s plaudit-strewn festival journey, and this Variety review will help to whet your appetite. (It’s also screening tomorrow in Leeds.)

PS :: There’s a rundown of other things going on this month at our listings archive. If you want this info sent to you directly, sign up to our email list on the left <<.

This film about a little robot discovering the joys of Digbeth was winner of the recent Film Dash challenge…

Dunkirk from Pete Ashton on Vimeo.

A last-minute reminder that there is a 48-hour film challenge going on in Birmingham this weekend, if you happen to have three days spare. At 6pm tomorrow you get your brief, and by 6pm on Sunday you need to have planned, shot and edited your film. More details on the Film Dash blog.

Yet another thing we forgot to mention in our listings; this is an exhibition which runs until 9 November at the University of Birmingham. It’s part of a wider project where artists and writers from across Europe share their experience of the transition from dictatorship to democracy. There is also a series of Wednesday night screenings at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth to complement the show, starting tomorrow (Weds 15 Oct) at 7pm with The Lives of Others.

A belated heads-up; tomorrow (Sat 30th August) sees the second edition of Outer Sight exploding from every orifice of The Edge in Digbeth. Obscure fillums in a slightly obscure place, and well worth seeking out. This sophomore outing (sorry, have been reading Variety reviews) features plenty of warped family entertainment, lethal cocktails, 3D viewing booths and guest musical turns from Mr Simon and Mrs 7inch – who will turn into a proper DJ soon if we’re not careful. The fun starts at 9pm, let google be your guide…

Still recovering from our marathon drive home, with stop-off in Morecambe for Lancastrian tapas (?). Beyond the jump is a brief writeup of our Ballerina Ballroom experience…

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