Daniel Kearns, founder and CEO of Friendly Neighbourhood Cinema, visited Flatpack Festival in Birmingham with the support of our bursaries, which are available to Film Hub Members to help them learn from and be a part of the wider community of film programmers.
In a new blog post, Daniel reflects on their experience of the festival.
'I think exhibits like this are vital because it doesn’t scale, you couldn’t do this across a hundred Odeons.
You rely on festivals like Flatpack to deliver experiences like this. And long may they continue to do so!'
Blog Written by Daniel Kearns
Thanks to Filmhub Midlands, I was able to visit and attend 2026’s Flatpack Festival… The One Where
Flatpack Turns 20! Celebrating a milestone year of annually transforming Birmingham into a giant
amusement park of arts: delivering a varied programme of film and exhibition across a variety of
independent Birmingham venues.
The Flatpack exhibition at Secret Space was a great encapsulation of the journey so far; it’s really
inspiring to see how the festival has developed year on year and its grassroots origins of 7-inch
Cinema I feel are still felt giving a really unique, authentic flavour and identity amongst other UK film
festivals.
Two standout legacy screenings I attended were screenings of The Raid, with a great intro from Phillip
Ray Tommy and the Friday finale of Withnail & I with a Q&A with Paul McGann - two favourite films of mine that were honoured really well by the festival. Being based in Stourbridge, I was happy to see the regional representation of Martin Parr’s Black Country Stories project from Multistory, brilliant heritage snapshots taken by a late talent.
I really enjoyed both the Overlap Animation Festival events I got to attend, particularly the unofficial
Sunday epilogue of a Q&A with Chris (Simpsons Artist) that featured the paper mache puppet panellist
“Chris’ Stepson” Ian, which I thought was a brilliantly inventive way to avatar for the anonymous artist.
Lloyd is building and championing a really great animation community!
It’s widely known and felt that the mainstream multiplex cinema model is undergoing major disruption and transformation. While these are uncertain times, I’m personally very interested in the potential in the evolution of film exhibition and in my own hobbyist research, I came across this quote in Eric Rhode’s A History of the Cinema from its Origins to 1970:
“I had some glowing dreams about what the cinema could be made to do and ought to do in teaching
the world things it needed to know - teaching in a more vivid, direct way… When the industry began
to specialise as a big amusement proposition I quit the game as an active producer”
T.A Edison
The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, 1948
Before cinema formalised itself into entertainment, cameras were just bizarre, unique instruments, with large applications in the medical field. It really struck me that the cinema format we’ve arrived at was not inevitable, and from the perspective of early inventors such as Edison and Lumière could even be a detour from something far more interesting.
I think in order to ensure cinema evolves in the right direction now is really the time for experimentation. Best demonstrated for me by the exhibition of A Cage in Search of a Nightingale. Presented in a triptych projection, archive of film strip and utilising the large warehouse acoustics of the space with a bespoke, awesome sound mix. I felt during this screening that I glimpsed some really interesting concepts this setup uniquely offered. Especially the way the atmosphere of the environment could be evoked in an abstract but more poetically immersive way, as if each window were fragments of memory of a place or moment.
I think exhibits like this are vital because it doesn’t scale, you couldn’t do this across a hundred Odeons. You rely on festivals like Flatpack to deliver experiences like this. And long may they continue to do so!
Inspired to attend a film festival? You can find all you need to know about applying for a bursary to attend vital events for industry progression here.