Adopt a Screening
Help us keep making festival magic.
Calling local film lovers, international Flatpack fans and passionate supporters of arts and culture. New for 2025, we're offering people the chance to support a screening at the festival, with a menu of specially curated events to choose from.
How it works
Step one: Browse the options below, and choose which screening you would like to 'adopt'.
Step two: Click the Adopt a Film button. This will take you to our payment platform Stripe, where you can select your chosen screening and the amount you would like to donate (our suggested donation is £200).
Step three: You'll then be contacted by the Flatpack team, who will send you two tickets to attend your chosen screening as our special guest. Your name will appear on the big screen as a supporter of Flatpack Festival, and you can settle in happy in the knowledge that you helped make it happen.
The Menu
1. Made in the Midlands - Our Midlands-focussed short film programme. High-quality drama, animation, documentary and experimental films all made by homegrown filmmakers.
- Made in the Midlands has now been adopted by West Midlands Combined Authority. A huge thanks for their generous support.
2. Alien - An evening of facehuggers and edge-of-your-seat action at Birmingham's Botanical Gardens courtesy of Ridley Scott's iconic sci-fi horror Alien. With great food and drink, a pumping soundtrack and a few surprises along the way, this is Alien like you’ve never seen it before - immersive, unforgettable, and totally out of this world.
3. The Birds - Psycho was a pretty tough act to follow, but Hitchcock knocked it out of the park with the tense, Technicolor masterpiece The Birds. Where better to screen the original ‘when nature attacks’ movie than the beautiful natural surroundings of Birmingham’s Botanical Gardens?
4. Clue - Enjoy Tim Curry’s delightfully over-the-top performance as Wadsworth the Butler (one of many appearances in the Flatpack programme this year), alongside a whirlwind of slapstick and a plot with more twists than you can shake a lead pipe at. But don’t relax too much. Keep an eye out for secret passageways and suspicious characters lurking in the shadows. This is no straightforward screening, and you might hold the very clues needed to figure out whodunnit.
5. Short Film Competition - Spanning all kinds of genres and styles, our BAFTA-qualifying Short Film Competition showcases boundary-pushing films that represent the best in contemporary filmmaking. (And yes, if you pick this one you get tickets to the whole competition!)
6. Slade in Flame - Fifty years after it bewildered many of Slade’s teenage fans, this wonderfully grubby, offbeat snapshot of British rock‘n’roll is back on the big screen thanks to a new BFI restoration. It’s a privilege to mark the occasion with one of the film’s stars and a musical legend: Mr Noddy Holder.
7. Time Flower - We are delighted to share a newly digitised screening of Time Flower, Desmond Morris’ 1948 experimental film. It’ll screen twice – with its original Prokofiev accompaniment and a new live score composed by Kinna Whitehead.
8. un.procedure: In Movements (opening night) - This immersive audiovisual experience sees visual artist Guri Bosh and experimental electronic jazz trio un.procedure come together for a performance where architecture, cinema, and sound merge. Expect multiple projections, a large interactive zoetrope, and a brilliant live performance from one of Birmingham’s most exciting groups.
9. The Lodger + Graham Reynolds (Live score) - Multitalented musician and composer Graham Reynolds returns to Flatpack to accompany a masterpiece of silent cinema. Made on the cusp of the sound era and full of the suspense and visual flourishes that would become his trademark, the director himself described The Lodger as ‘the first true Hitchcock movie.’
10. Pavements - Alt rock icons Pavement get the tongue-in-cheek tribute they deserve from Alex Ross Perry, who describes this as ‘not a Pavement documentary, but a Pavement movie.’
Where does the money go?
Flatpack Projects is a registered charity, and the income we receive from box office only goes a small way towards covering the cost of putting on an annual festival. In the case of screenings, we have to take into account venue hire, guest travel, screening fees, film transportation, staffing, promotional costs and plenty more besides. Your contribution plays a crucial part in helping make Flatpack happen, and making it accessible to as many people as possible through incentives such as our Solidarity Ticket scheme.