Birmingham has never been high on my hitlist of minibreak destinations. The Flatpack Festival program is, however, filled with films from exotic locations and ideas from afar. This is the third year that the 7 Inch Cinema have put on this five-day event.
It’s Saturday brunchtime and we’re due the obligatory minibreak bacon sandwich. Happy and fed we head to Festival HQ, Floodgate Kino, to see Knitflicks, a series of shorts about knitting. Clacking away at their own creations in the audience are mothers and daughters, craft enthusiasts and rockabilly fans of the Stitch ‘n’ Bitch movement. It’s a surprisingly broad theme and not half as whimsical as I’d expected. With dancing felt toadstools and a cloth countryside, Michel Gondry’s animated promo A Ribbon makes the less polished videos look like bad Orange adverts (soundtracks included).
A 10-minute preview of American documentary, Handmade Nation is tantalisingly short. Converts to the DIY way of life seated in the front row fistbump in recognition that ‘the revolution has come’. Apparently I’m one of the few still to be convinced that needlepoint is ‘better than drugs and alcohol and therapy’.
With time to leaf through the program and mill around the welcoming warehouse base, I check out some of the installations set up around the room. Next to the bar there’s what looks to be a pedal powered, one-seated cinema that is, according to said program a ‘phenakistoscope’. It’s basically an old-fashioned and more complicated exercise bike-cum-TV. A lady with purple tights has a go at this personalised cinema experience and is rewarded with flickering Spirograph wheels. Imax it ain’t.
Round the corner at The Custard Factory we see the Juche Idea. Swigging from a bottle of screw cap Jacob’s Creek in the back row we blur the lines between pretension and the penny pinching of students. A huge bag of Polish crisps prompts jokes about going on holiday to get Lays. The film is fantastic. Jim Finn directs an evenhanded documentary about the role of propaganda and dictator Kim Jong-il in North Korea’s film industry. It’s funny and insightful and worth the trip alone.
