The Dream Factory presents Flatpack Festival
May 17 by Amplify
Cultural insight
Plenty of people have sat in the pub and grumbled that their local cinema isn't up to scratch, but Birmingham-based husband and wife Ian Francis and Pip McKnight took it a step further. They brought the cinema to the pub.
"There were a few cinemas showing arthouse, but in terms of shorts, which is where a lot of the creativity is, there was very little," explains Francis. "This was in 2003 and short film was exploding on the Internet, but you wouldn't have known it in Birmingham cinemas."
Inspired by the city's music scene, the pair borrowed a fast-fold screen and a projector, bundled them down to their local and set up Seven Inch Cinema, a film night that took "a mix-tape approach" to shorts, showing films alongside live acts, DJs and slide shows. The West Midlands had never seen anything like it. Seven Inch Cinema began popping up at gigs and in the city's many abandoned industrial buildings, turning Birmingham into an improvised multiplex and building a loyal following of short film fans that would park themselves in front of the screen wherever it was set up.
Based out of their attic and working entirely for free, Francis and McKnight then pulled off a hugely successful festival, mixing their beloved shorts with longer features, arts events and live shows. Flatpack became an annual fixture on Birmingham's cultural calendar, and at the end of 2008 the UK Film Council came calling, making Flatpack one of its seven key national events and delivering a chunk of money, "which has paid a lot of bills".
Peter Buckingham, Head of Distribution and Exhibition at the UK Film Council, finds the potential outreach of the festival exciting. "As technology becomes more and more accessible, people are able to come across film in lots of different ways," he says. "But there aren't many film festivals that are doing [what they do]. When you put art and culture in unusual places, people encounter it and enjoy it and begin participating with it. So with Flatpack, you find there are people who might not ordinarily go and watch ‘art' cinema coming across it and getting something out of it."
