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.

Meet Anzu, a super-sized, immortal ghost cat who rides a moped, works as a masseuse, and loves to nap. When 11-year-old Karin is left at her grandfather’s house by her father, she’s feeling pretty down, but things get interesting when she meets Anzu, the lazy ghost cat assigned to look after her. The pair embark on a crazy adventure that takes them from the quiet temple to the bustling stree...

Having grown in stature and reputation over the last couple of years, the Reel Brum network is thriving. Each month the event brings together the city’s filmmaking talent for talks, presentations, and screenings. We’re super excited to present the best of all the films shown at Reel Brum’s events over the past year at Flatpack 2025, one of which will go on to win the Reel Brum award (£200 ca...

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.

Having grown in stature and reputation over the last couple of years, the Reel Brum network is thriving. Each month the event brings together the city’s filmmaking talent for talks, presentations, and screenings. We’re super excited to present the best of all the films shown at Reel Brum’s events over the past year at Flatpack 2025, one of which will go on to win the Reel Brum award (£200 ca...

A Free Mystery Movie Every Friday Night*, no clues, but it will probabley be a banger. Come join the club. If you can buy a beer or some sweets that would really help us out. *Most Fridays, just a 95p booking fee per ticket

Winner of Best Animated Film at the 2025 Oscars. 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.

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...

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.

A director persuades an actor to resume making a film they began ten years before. Shooting is almost complete at their hotel base in Wuhan, when word starts to come through of a deadly virus. Drawing on outtakes from his previous work, lockdown phone footage, zoom calls and CCTV, acclaimed director Lou Ye has created a film which is by turns contemplative, tense and moving. An Unfinished Fi...

‘I dreamt about you last night, and I fell out of bed twice.’ Many of The Smiths’ most memorable early lyrics were lifted from the work of playwright Shelagh Delaney, and there’s a choice selection of them in this wonderful 1961 adaptation of her debut play, written when she was only 19. The film has been selected by photographer Nick Hedges, whose revelatory images of housing conditions in ...

Get ready for a no holds barred evening of undead mayhem. The Return of the Living Dead is a cult classic with a killer punk soundtrack and as many laughs as there are scares. When a toxic gas leak reanimates the dead, a group of unsuspecting warehouse workers soon learn that these aren’t your average shuffling corpses. They run, talk, and demand one thing - brains. A riot of blood, laugh...

Strap in for Krazy House, the horror-comedy that takes the wholesome American sitcom and douses it in blood, blasphemy, and pure, unhinged chaos. Dutch directors Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil (New Kids Turbo) crank the dial well past 11, serving up an ultra-violent fever dream where no one - not even the family dog - is safe. There are shotgun decapitations, religious satire, and enough g...

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...

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...

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...