Created in Birmingham

The Union Black Film Festival is the UK’s first region specific film festival, celebrating Black British cinema based in central Birmingham, and is taking place from Thursday 14 – Sunday 17 October.

The festival will bring panel discussions, debates, events and film screenings. From commercial hits, to classics, here’s what’s on offer;

14 October – Burning an Illusion (1981), 9pm at The Custard Factory

15 October – Pressure (1975), 9pm at The Custard Factory

16 October – Precious (2009), 11am at Odeon Cinema, New St.

17 October – The Princess and the Frog (2009), 1.30pm at mac, which will include mask making and story telling as part of the festival’s family morning.

Aside from the family morning, other educational events include;

14 October – Mirror Mirror; Reflections of Black Women in the Media, 7pm at The Custard Factory. The evening will welcome a panel of leading black women within British media to discuss whether current images of scantily clad black women to victims of gang violence are having a negative impact on the self image and self-esteem of young black girls. A short documentary by a group of Birmingham based teen girls will follow the debate, focusing on this topic.

15 October – Glorious Technicolour, 7pm at The Custard Factory. This event will examine the reasons why black people still remain under-represented both in front of and behind the camera in Britain’s media industry. For all the regions film makers this also provides an opportunity to ask those already established how best to get their work funded and/or commissioned.

Tonight Birmingham International Film Society will be celebrating 50 years of Nigerian Independence with a double bill of Nollywood films.

At 6.15pm Welcome to Nollywood will be screened, followed by a Q&A with special guest, Nollywood actress Chinelo Ndigwe. Then screening at 8pm is Thunderbolt, directed by Tunde Kelani.

Coming up there are more international film treats in the Sept/Oct programme;

Thursday 30 September: The Girl on the Train (Dir. André Téchiné, France) at 6pm / Storm (Dir. Hans-Christian Schmid, Germany) at 8pm.

Monday 4 October: Ivul (Dir. Andrew Kötting, France) at 6pm / A Room and a Half (Dir. Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, Russia) at 8pm.

Birmingham International Film Society screenings are held at Library Theatre. Tickets for all screenings are £3.50/ £2.50 (concessions), and for double bill screenings are £6/ £4 (concessions). Book online and by calling 0121 303 2323

The issue of local TV has cropped up again recently.

A couple of weeks back Will Perrin put some thoughts down, responding to government plans to encourage the development of up to twenty new local TV stations by 2015. The general gist of his post (although I’d encourage you to read it) was that there’s no need, it won’t work and, besides, the web would do the job better.

Nick Booth has built on this and claims that Birmingham’s informal, fledgling network of local, mainly volunteer-led news websites shows that people are already delivering the kind of activity Jeremy Hunt says he wants to encourage using TV stations (see Nick’s post for details).

My generally unconsidered view on this is that establishing a local TV station wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing – if someone (and I think City TV are still looking to get involved) can make the finances stack up and run something that doesn’t depend on handouts then great. It just doesn’t seem to be a particularly forward-thinking thing to spend public cash on.

If money/time/effort/attention/whatever is going to be spent on local media, I’d rather it was spent on getting people using the web and using it better – helping them access local information and publishing it themselves. There’s no reason video can’t be part of that – see I Am Birmingham for an example of someone using a website with a free template and a YouTube account to do regular-ish video content.

Also in the web’s favour – costs and barriers to entry are lower and the skills required are more readily transferrable. It’s also relevant to the government’s current strategy of closing down public services and replacing them with websites (Jobcentre Plus, Business Link and so on).

The whole ‘more TV by 2015′ thing bothers me too. 2015 is five years off. Bear in mid that YouTube is only five years old and you get a sense of  how much things could change in the intervening years.

Anyway, I feel I’m starting to edge slightly further away from CiB-land now. If you want to get involved in the debate then see what people are saying on Will and Nick‘s posts.

When I was 17, a considerable time ago, I wrote a short story which I was very proud of and equally pleased with. It consisted of just a handful of sentences/paragraphs, but “artistically” it was personally satisfying. I have always remembered this story in great detail, and in many ways consider it as the most authentic thing I have ever created

Paul Busst, thanks to some friendly coercion via Facebook, is now planning to make that story into a short film. The 43RPM Productions blog is:

A record of making a short film with no previous experience

Hi8us Midlands will be hosting a series of free workshops for 14-19 year olds in association with the Film Nation: Shorts competition.

The workshops will give young film-makers the chance to meet professional film-makers and acquire new skills in film-making techniques using the latest state-of-the-art Panasonic equipment.

Film Nation: Shorts was launched by eminent film producer Lord David Putnam and actors Nicholas Hoult and Georgia Groome at BAFTA in London and invites 14-25 year olds to create short films that celebrate the values of the Olympic and Paralympic Games: respect, courage, excellence, friendship, equality, determination and inspiration.

The workshops will be held on 11th, 12th, 17th, 18th and 19th August from 10am to 4pm at The Bond and participants should be able to attend all dates.

Workshops for the 19-25′s will be popping up across the country, so check back to the Film Nation site if you’re interested.

Submissions for the first round of the competition are open until 1 October 2010.

Anyone interested in attending should contact Vicki at Hi8us on 0121 753 7700 or email vicki@hi8us.co.uk.

There was a film crew at the bottom of my road the other morning. I’m not sure what they were filming (it was Doctors last time) but there are a few crews filming in the city at the moment. Hustle‘s back and Helena Bonham Carter Carter keeps being spotted in Kings Heath minding her own business/filming Toast.

However, it’s the no-budget Turbulence that’s swamped my Twitter stream over the past couple of weeks:

TURBULENCE is a Musical Romantic Comedy. The project is a collaboration between the actors David Alwyn, Adrian Banks, Emma Devereaux, Connor Mills, Shay O’Driscoll and Sophie Waller (all recent graduates of Birmingham School of Acting) and BAFTA award winning producer/director team Natasha Carlish and Michael B Clifford. Other exciting collaborators in the project are Adam Regan and the Hare & Hounds, The Scholars and Katy Pryce

There’s no particular budget for the film but it’s great to see how many people have pitched in to get the thing filmed.

Things are being documented diligently on their blog, so have a browse through. There’s likely to be scope for getting involved if you fancy it – a Twitter search for #turbulencefilm should keep you up to date on that.

SoulBoy’s had a fair amount of local involvement. Here’s the trailer:

And here’s the SoulBoy website.

SoulBoy facts:

• Number of funder/sponsor/partner logos on all SoulBoy stuff – 16
• Number of SoulBoy cast members listed on IMDB – 24
• Number of SoulBoy cast members listed as ‘Purple Onion Girl’ – 1 (with a special mention for ‘Divvy punter’ too)

Ian and Pip from 7 Inch Cinema/Flatpack Festival have been nominated for The Hospital Club 100 which is:

a search for the most influential people in the creative and media industries, with the emphasis on current contribution and importance, not just the size of someone’s celebrity status, profile, bank balance, titles or past reputation

I’ve no idea what the award would mean but they say it’ll make their mums proud, which is good enough reason for me. Besides, Ian and Pip are good souls who do some good work. Speaking of which, they have some events coming up.

Trawling down the other nominees, I spotted Sue Collins in the ‘Art’ category. The blurb says this about her:

She has recently just completed a her first solo museum show at IKON in Birmingham, and in response was dubbed by the Mirror as the ‘worst artist in Britain’

Which was enough to secure my vote.

The Bridge is a film made by Virtual Extreme Youth Media CIC, based in the Jewellery Quarter, to raise awareness around mental health.

More info via Screen WM.

If you’re interested in making a music video – be you musician/band or filmmaker – then keep an eye on the 2Weeks 2Make It website and/or if you’re on Twitter then watch @2weeksbrum like the proverbial hawk.

An article on the Guardian’s film blog has asked:

Can Birmingham’s eclectic lucky dip of a festival help rejuvenate its Digbeth base?

That festival being Flatpack. Now, I was always told that if the title of a newspaper article asks a question then the answer is most likely ‘no’. In this case, the answer given is revealed to be more like ‘well, first of all Digbeth needs a cash machine, some residents, public transport, a post office and some street lighting’. Which is fair enough.

Hanging the cultural hopes of  an entire area on one annual festival (no matter how good) was a bit of a reach anyway.

On another matter, two parts of the article jumped out:

Amazingly, points out George Clark, a curator who put together Flatpack’s Build Them in the Mind programme of short films, Birmingham still lacks a proper arthouse cinema. This in England’s second-largest city.

Which is true but needs tallying against Ian Francis saying:

“I hate it when people say Birmingham is apathetic” about film and culture, he says. “The interest is there”

Which is also true.

That there’s only one independent cinema in Birmingham is a bit of a shocker, but mac reopens soon and don’t forget the Light House is only just up the road.

Even better, there are quite a few people getting off their backsides to put films on away from the multiplexes. Film nights are rife – off the top of my head there’s Moving Pictures, Juniper Cinema, Kino Concrete, Filmrats, Popcorn, the Animation Forum events, BIFS, Screen Sunday at The Plough and occasional things at The Sunflower Lounge. Those are just the ones I can remember, too. Pretty much all of those are in pubs, which isn’t always going to be ideal and they’re unlikely to show the latest releases, but I think Ian’s right about apathy not being the problem.

Pogus Caesar’s film ‘Muscleback’ surfaced on the Wooster Collective‘s site the other day. I’m not going to feign understanding but I did watch for the whole 6-ish minutes:

Via the Wooster Collective.

Multi-coloured lines are starting to appear all over the place. That’s Ikon Eastside above. They’ve got plenty of things happening there. Check out the rest of the schedule too and cop some tickets.

Other folks have written about what to see:

• Digbeth is Good – A notice for fans of Irish film, literature and that
• More Canals Than Venice – Music docs at Flatpack, More reasons to get excited about Flatpack

That’s ‘sting’ with a small ‘s’. See below.

I’ve not had much of a chance to check out the Flatpack Festival schedule yet. All I know is that it will be superb and will be worth attending to the fullest possible extent.

For example, the first thing I’ve looked at is a talk by Barry Purves:

Barry has animated and directed many prominent television series such as The Wind in the Willows, Rupert Bear, Bob the Builder and worked on feature films like Mars Attacks and King Kong. His own, often controversial, animated films have won over sixty major international awards and received OSCAR and BAFTA nominations

Which sounds ruddy impressive and interesting to me.

Also, just up on the Flatpack blog is the little sting that’ll be featured between screenings. It was animated by David Mourato, uses an original design and sound editing by Dave Gaskarth and Birmingham City University‘s Visual Communication department were involved in some way too.

This is one of my projects, so please excuse.

In 2008 I organised a 48-hour film competition. It went well, especially considering it was put together on zero budget and six weeks notice. Now…

Film Dash is back!

It’ll happen over the weekend of 5-7 March 2010. Here’s the deal:

Write, cast, shoot, and edit a short film in 48 hours. If you’ve got a camera – even one on a mobile phone –
you’ve got all you need to make a film. You don’t need any experience to join in with Film Dash and it’s FREE to enter.

This year’s theme is ‘happiness’, so get thinking; what makes you happy? But remember – you’ll be given a prop, a character, or even a line of dialogue to include in your film, so don’t have too much prepared!

Also: Prizes! Judges! The chance for your film to be shown all over the place!

Register your team here.

You can get info and updates on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to Film Dash on YouTube to see the films as they’re produced.

Here’s the poster, designed by the good people of Supercool:

And here’s the winning entry from 2008 – Dunkirk by Team TTV.

Dunkirk from Pete Ashton on Vimeo.