Express & Star

Programme announced for Flatpack Festival in Birmingham

Flatpack Festival has launched it's 2019 Birmingham event programme.

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Audiences at Flatpack Festival

For it's 13th year in the city, Stewart Lee and Michael Cumming offer an exclusive taste of their new documentary King Rocker.

The film offers a unique tribute to the Black Country’s unsung post-punk heroes The Nightingales.

Cumming will also screen his film Oxide Ghosts, sharing his personal insights into the process of making the cult TV series Brass Eye.

Flatpack will open at the Royal Birmingham Conservetoire with a screening of A Page of Madness, with other screenings including Bo Burnham's Eight Grade, Summer, Peter Strickland's In Fabric, Narcissister Organ Player, Meeting Gorbachev and more.

Other highlights include the world premiere of immersive theatre piece A Moment Of Madness, in which participants are thrust into the heart of a spy thriller in a car park, and the first solo exhibition from the BAFTA-award winning animator and illustrator Greg McLeod - Bermingham: The (Not Entirely) True Story of a Misspelt City.

Popular family strand Colour Box will return to the festival with Beautiful Bento workshops, the Soundplay Dome, and a preview of Sky TV's Moomin Valley featuring Richard Ayoade and Matt Berry.

Part cinema and part music gig, Optical Sound offers a fusion of live performance and audio-visual artistry.

In 2018 Flatpack launched the inaugural Waveform artist development programme, supporting a group of 12 UK-based artists to create audio-visual performance pieces and Waveform artist Natalie Sharp will present Lone Taxidermist: Bodyvice her new multidisciplinary performance exploring chronic pain at this year’s festival.

Flatpack has always had a taste for digging into the archives, now reflected in a new strand gathering rare, unseen material and revealing the stories behind it.

A day of Video Tales at MAC will showcase rediscoveries from the VHS era, including a peek at pioneering booking agency and record shop Oriental Star 4- years after they brought qawwali legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to the UK for the first time.

A number of volunteers will share their early film experiments in Oh Dear Video Diary, film academic Richard Dyer will return to the city where he first developed influential ideas on stars and queer identity, and special guest Hanifa McQueen Hudson - known as B-Girl Bubbles - will reflect on landmark hip hop documentary Bombin'.

The Unpacked and short film strands also return to the festival for 2019.

Flatpack Festival comes to Birmingham from April 30 to May 5.

For more information and to buy tickets, click here.