Flatpack Festival
Film for all the senses

Team pick #2

Friday 18th March, 2011

I'm Tegid, Festival Assistant. Over the last five months I have been doing everything from sourcing bed sheets to cover in concrete, finding places to park a Vintage Mobile Cinema to cycling round Brum distributing flyers! Here are a few things I'm most looking forward to:



Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then

Brent Green's blend of stop-motion animation and live action is poetic, a little bit creepy and continually mesmerising. Based on the true story of Lag Wood, a man who builds a house in his back garden which he believes is a healing machine that can save the life of his girlfriend. Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then relies upon dream-logic to lull you through a complex story of loss and reconstruction.


Halfway between an animation and a film, a drama and a documentary Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then could come across as an exercise in filmic experimentation but at its heart is an attempt to understand a persons journey through grief, 'I don't understand how he saw how a lot of this stuff was gonna work. I think I do now, but when I was down there I couldn't work out what the 23ft tower for a laundry room could possible do for someone's life until you realise he was building up towards God.' Dir. Brent Green.


It also features a beautiful soundtrack inspired by Lag Wood's own recordings of  'crazy-people church music' and the Mid-West.



Busy Being Born

Celebrating the imminent departure of Pip, festival Co-Director for a career in midwifery, Busy Being Born is an array of films which look at how we come screaming, meowing and spinning into the world.


It's also in this shorts segment that I'll be taking an hour out of my assisting Flatpack to perform with MUTE - a jazz/folk/pop quartet who'll be improvising to a silent 1940s documentary Private Life of a Cat. We improvise to silent films and add an extra element of risk by not watching the films we're going to improvise to beforehand - expect strange harmonies and peculiar musical representations of cats. Not to be missed!

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