Bendito Machine III from Zumbakamera on Vimeo.

Aztec shadow-puppets discover television. No.3 of a proposed 10-part series. Whatever would Lotte Reiniger think? See also: The Fantastic World of Fantástico Morales – ‘a man with a strange nasal fluid powers’.
www.benditomachine.com

If you’ve ever been to a Birmingham Opera production in a warehouse or burnt-out ice-rink and wondered how they got such a thing off the ground, spend an hour listening to Graham Vick and it all starts to make a bit more sense. This is quite a special man. Sharp-eyed, passionate, with a very clear idea of what he wants to do and say while remaining bracingly honest about the doubts and contradictions of being an opera-director. He clearly loves his job, and his enthusiasm is hard to resist. ‘I want you to be part of what I believe’ was one of the many lines that stood out from his lunchtime talk at the Barber Institute today. By blogging my scribbled notes below I probably run the risk of making him sound like a luvvie or a demagogue, but he is a long way from either. (more…)

Trailer for a new documentary about composer Raymond Scott by his son, Stan Warnow. Sensoria Festival in Sheffield are premiering the film next Tuesday, with Warnow talking to Martyn Ware (Heaven 17) afterwards.

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?

Today we went for a curry in the Big Bulls Head with artist and animator Ian Emes. He is best known for creating the visuals for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon tour, but his jumbled CV also includes Oscar-nominated short Goodie Two Shoes, Comic Strip film The Yob with Keith Allen and most recently kids TV series Bookaboo. Ian grew up in Erdington and studied at Birmingham College of Art where he was turned on to the likes of Oskar Fischinger. It was matinee encounters with Flash Gordon at the Odeon Kingstanding – one of the stars of our recent bus tour – which turned him into a filmmaker. Look out for a selection of his work as part of a 70s show at Ikon Gallery this summer.

Thanks to having our heads in a festival-planning hole, other Birmingham film-related stuff has passed us by over the last few weeks. Here’s a brief post to help rectify that…

FILM DASH
Thursday 11 March at the Electric
The second edition of this 48 hour film challenge just wrapped up, and the results will be on show at the Electric tonight from 7pm.

WM FILMMAKERS FOR HAITI
Saturday 13 March at the Edge, Cheapside in Digbeth
Fundraiser featuring shorts, promos and DJs.

FILM RATS
Thursday 18 March at the Sunflower Lounge
Regular evening of films and performance, now transplanted from Selly Oak to a new venue in town.

Submissions are also still open for the Shorts on Walls event at Flatpack – get your animations to AFWM by 18th March.

There was a programme on radio 4 this morning about memories of Fort Dunlop, that impressive slab of a building you see from the M6 coming into Birmingham. More info here, and it’ll be on iPlayer for a week.

We’ve also been enjoying a series of postcards posted by Joyfeed, sent by his grandparents after they left the Fort to go and work for Dunlop in Japan.

Apparently this was somebody’s AS level art project:

[via @AnimateProjects]

The usual pre-Flatpack tumbleweed on this blog. Just posted a brief summary of what you can expect in the festival over here – full details online in a fortnight.

Happy noo year. Been watching quite a few films about movie-going recently, and came across this three-minuter which the Coens made for the 2007 Cannes film festival:

Sort of reminded me of ‘The Day of the Premiere of Close Up’, with Nanni Moretti losing sleep over the box-office reception for a Kiarostami film. (On youtube, but only in Italian I’m afraid.) And on a similar tack, in this article Mark Cousins talks about showing ‘The Red Balloon’ to hordes of kids in northern Iraq when filming his documentary The First Movie.

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.)