Birmingham’s Flatpack Festival will return to the city for its first in-person edition since spring 2019 this weekend with a programme that covers various bases across film and music.
The event, which usually takes place each spring, will take over a number of venues around Birmingham, and will begin on Thursday (September 23) with a night of audiovisual performances, called Optical Sound: Live, from Dutch audiovisual composer Tarik Barri and artist Lea Fabrikant; live-cinema artist Paul Prudence; and multi-disciplinary US artist Zach Walker.
The festival will also take in a live performance from jazz saxophonist and flautist Xhosa Cole, alongside an eight-piece ensemble, which will see them collectively rescore Charles Lane’s 1989 film Sidewalk Stories. Shiyi Li, Gloria Yehilevsky and James Owston of Sounding Eye Collective, meanwhile, will debut an immersive performance that combines multi-screen animation with a contemporary jazz music score that explores the ancient Chinese philosophy known as ‘The Butterfly Dream’, for an event dubbed Dreamerfly, And Other Stories.
Other festival programme highlights include screenings of On-Gaku: Our Sound, a film exploring the world of garage bands, and Andy Howlett’s Paradise Lost, on the final days of the condemned Birmingham Central Library complex and its opposing view by Birmingham City Council as an eyesore, and by Historic England as a feat of post-war design.
Flatpack Festival: Autumn Edition will take place from September 23 to 26, 2021. Find more information here.
