Flatpack 2013 – Animation Programme Overview
This Easter weekend Skwigly ventured out into the unseasonable cold to experience Birmingham’s Flatpack Festival. There was plenty to choose from as the animated films and events take up an encouraging chunk of the ten-day programme.
The event takes place over several venues across Birmingham, some of these a little further from the centre but the majority of it could be found in Digbeth. The nucleus of the festivities was the Custard Factory arts building with the adjacent Flatpack Palais pop-up theatre hosting many free events you can drop in and out of. Among the other venues were The Electric, which is the UK’s oldest working cinema and The Mac, a modern arts complex which mostly caters to younger audiences
Highlights include festival stalwarts Phone Home by The Brothers McLeod and Oh Willy… by Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels. The 28-minute hallucinatory morphing claymation Prometheus’ Garden is a surreal experience from the mind of Bruce Bickford. Soviet animation in 3D, first shown at the 2012 Encounters Festival, is something quite special and was lovingly presented with live subtitles in the perfect setting of The Electric film theatre.
Kickstarter success story Cicada Princess by Mauricio Baiocchi is as good as expected of anything with Stephen Fry’s narration attached to it – the drawback being that the credits seem to go on as long as the film itself which eventually led to laughter from the crowd. Big House by Kristjan Holm gets an honorable mention purely because of the guy who starts crooning along to the music halfway through it.
Cicada Princess (Dir. Mauricio Baiocchi)
Families with children were well catered for with separate Colour Box screenings designed for a younger audience. A nice touch was how they would occasionally stop between the short films for the compere to discuss what the animations were about with the audience. This led to a great atmosphere, the kids really enjoying the short films without getting restless. Highlights included Joel Simon’s slick stop-motion adventure Macropolis, Conor Finnegan’s Fear of Flying and the lovely Latvian short Hedgehogs and the City by Evalds Lacis.
Hedgehogs & The City (dir. Evalds Lacis)
Those who appreciate the more abstract or experimental side of animation would not have disappointed. There was a strong bias towards unconventional short films at the closing weekend with an award handed out for the one that the organisers were most baffled by. This is clearly a festival that relishes the more unusual and innovative aspects of filmmaking. A 3D party event, complete with retro red & blue glasses, had live generated stereoscopic visuals and showed 3D scans of attendees faces that were created using an Xbox Kinect sensor hooked up to a pc at the back of the venue.
On the closing night there was an informal awards ceremony where they handed out trophies in the shape of an allen key. This is the first year in which they have decided to give out awards and two of the categories were judged by filmgoers themselves. The winners were:
Flatpack Short Film Award – Feels Like We Only Go Backwards (dir: Becky Sloan & Joseph Pelling)
Flatpack WTF Award – Trespass (dir: Paul Wenninger)
Flatpack Audience Award – Oh Willy… (dir: Emma de Swaef et Marc James Roels)
Colour Box Award – Hedgehogs and the City (dir: Evalds Lacis)
Colour Box Audience Award – Subway Train (dir: Garrett Davis)