Cat is a solitary animal, but as its home is devastated by a great flood, he finds refuge on a boat populated by various species, and will have to team up with them despite their differences.
A mysterious portal pulls four misfits into the Overworld, a bizarre, cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination. To get back home, they'll have to master the terrain while embarking on a magical quest with an unexpected crafter named Steve.
This beautiful film uses a patchwork of animation techniques to create a kaleidoscopic picture of one relationship. Olivia hides the ghost of her past love Ramón under her bed. Ramón remembers Olivia as a talking plant who he hides in his apartment. In the present day, Barbara turns her stop-start romance with Olivia’s son Mauricio into a stop-frame film. Over the course of ten years Tomás P...
A man revisits his childhood beach to surf with his son. Humiliated by locals, he becomes entangled in an escalating conflict that pushes him to his limits.
Outsiders may jumble us together, but Birmingham and the Black Country are in fact different planets. While city folk struggle to navigate a cluster of villages which suddenly became an industrial powerhouse in the 18th century, that apparently chaotic hodgepodge has become fertile ground for the creativity on show in this double bill. Dion & the Unicorn (dir: Dan Watts 2024, 40 mins) Filmed d...
A fixture in the festival programme, our Optical Sound shorts explore sound in all its aural glory. Featuring the brilliantly inventive Lamento, in which a couple quarrel whilst sampling the love songs of Michael Jackson and Beyoncé amongst others; Benoit Méry’s Apocalypse, a documentary that takes French heavy metal festival ‘Hellfest’ as its subject and captures the pure, unadulterated joy of...
What links two children who find money frozen in a block of ice, a confusing tour guide, and a man on a mysterious journey to visit his estranged mother? On the surface, not a lot. But by merging the cities of Winnipeg and Tehran into a surreal - but never unbelievable - new location, Flatpack alum Matthew Rankin creates the perfect place for all of these stories to interweave. A city sympho...
Marking the 50th anniversary of Robert Wyatt's iconic album Rock Bottom, María Trénor's remarkable animated feature takes us on a psychedelic trip through a time when Bob met his partner Alif. The two young artists become immersed in the creative whirlwind of early 70s hippie culture when Bob has a terrible accident. Transcending biography and weaving a poetic tapestry of love and artistic c...
Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their Mississippi hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
The next wave of filmmaking talent is here. Flatpack’s Young Filmmaker strand Short & Suite returns with a programme of bold, fresh, exciting films from emerging creators across the country. This year students at the University of Birmingham are paying homage to our second-city status with a programme of one-minute wonders. From striking concepts to creative experiments, these lightning-fast...
The future of filmmaking can be found right here in the Midlands. We’re celebrating the next wave of local talent with a showcase of films made by the BFI Film Academy’s 2024 cohort. These 16-19-year olds have honed their creative voices and flexed their filmmaking muscles to produce bold stories that get straight to the heart of the Midlands. Young filmmakers from across the region are s...
Flatpack’s Young Filmmaker strand returns with another programme showcasing the incredible talent to be found amidst the UK’s young filmmaker community. Earlier this year we opened up submissions to filmmakers aged 16-25 nationwide, and they did not disappoint. Full of work by students and first time filmmakers, this programme is a treasure trove of original voices. If a decade from now you wan...
As always, this year’s shorts competition is full of brilliant films from all over the world. But we’ve got a real soft spot for the abundance of incredible talent right here in the Midlands. Expect high-quality drama, animation, documentary and experimental films all made by homegrown filmmakers. Films: Dr XYZ: A Medical Drag Transthology (El Jones, UK, 2024 14 mins) Extra Cleaning (J...
Mirror Images: A Conversation On Personal Filmmaking
Tue 13 May
There are a few feature documentaries in the festival programme this year where filmmakers point the camera at their own family, as well as themselves (e.g. Motherboard and Silent Men). In Mirror Images we delve into this phenomenon a little further. Through support from Doc Society, this panel discussion with directors Duncan Cowles and Victoria Mapplebeck will explore the ethical consideratio...
Curated by Misha Zakharov The guest-curated project Carceral Cinema (2025–26) aims to spark conversations about carcerality, representations of prisons, and race and gender in the context of incarceration through the lens of film. The first Carceral Cinema screening will take place at Flatpack 2025, showcasing accounts of women in North American prisons, created by iconic social justice film...
Victoria Mapplebeck's intimate portrait of single parenthood via home video footage immediately draws you into her family's world. Spanning 20 years, we witness Mapplebeck navigate the highs and lows of motherhood, while her son, Jim, grapples with growing up without his father. Life-altering events, like a cancer diagnosis and the loss of Victoria's father, unfold alongside small, everyday mom...
Flatpack alum Duncan Cowles turns his sharp eye to men’s mental health in Silent Men, his feature debut. After admitting that he himself struggles to open up, especially to those he loves most, Cowles goes on a road trip to uncover why men find it so difficult to express their feelings. Full of the dry humour we know and love in his short films, Silent Men is a lesson in vulnerability, a que...
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.’ There’s definitely the thread of a classic rise-and-fall-and-return music doc in here, but it’s woven together with the opening of a new museum devoted to the band, rehearsals for Slanted! Enchanted! – a jukebox musical built from S...
Ghassan Salhab’s debut feature Phantom Beirut (Ashbah Beyrouth) is steeped in ghosts - both literal and metaphorical. Set in the late 1980s - whilst Lebanon’s Civil War limps to a close - it follows Khalil, a man who faked his own death ten years earlier. Now returning to Beirut under a new identity he’s forced to confront the people, and past, he abandoned. Blurring the lines between fictio...
We’re delighted to welcome James Lawrence Slattery and Sean Burns to Flatpack for an evening of clips and conversation to mark Routledge’s publication of Taking Back Desire: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Queerness and Neoliberalism on Screen. Drawing on Slattery’s PhD thesis, the book examines a range of film, television and video art texts including Paris Is Burning, Pose, Sharp Objects, 120 BP...
BFI NETWORK and Film Hub Midlands are back for Midlands Short Film Club - another chance to celebrate the exciting things happening right here in the Midlands - proving you don’t need Hollywood to make a great film. The team will be previewing films created through BFI NETWORK Short Film Funding over the last two years, as well as being joined by a panel of filmmakers to talk about the importan...
