Short talks & 16mm screenings

Throughout the day the upstairs space at Dig Brew will be hosting a range of free talks, performances and screenings riffing on our 1968 theme. Order of service is as follows...

1pm: BCU 68 Puppet show

A group of illustration students at Birmingham City University have picked up the 1968 theme and run with it, creating two brand new puppet performances.

2pm: Radical Film Network - 1968 season

The Radical Film Network is an international network which aims to develop politically engaged film culture, and fifty years on from 68 they will be mounting a series of events and screenings across the country. If you'd like to get involved or just find out more about the network, do come along.

3pm: CINEMA 68: The Year That Cannes Broke Down

The 1968 Cannes Film Festival is notorious for being shut down half way through by a group of French filmmakers led by Truffaut and Godard. In this short talk Will Fowler, curator at the BFI, will consider the politics and events that surrounded Cannes that year, whilst also using the festival as a lens to explore not just ‘the Sixties’ or May ’68, but cinema itself at that precise moment. How did art, commerce and the revolution intersect? What didn’t screen? And why?

4:30pm: Arts Lab 16mm show

The Birmingham Arts Lab started life in the front bedroom of Tony Jones' Sparkbrook home, with regular screenings of 16mm prints for friends. Tony went on to run the Lab cinema for many years before moving on to Cambridge Picturehouse and co-founding the UK-wide Picturehouse chain. Today he comes full circle and will be sharing a selection of suitably off-kilter 16mm delights, including three works by experimental film pioneer Kenneth Anger.