Flatpack Festival presents Curzonora A Celebration of Cinema's Early Days Featuring The Destroyers

A unique evening of film and music, revisiting the days when cinema first came to Birmingham.

At the beginning of the 1900s, before cinemas had even been invented, a promoter called Waller Jeffs introduced the people of Birmingham to an amazing new entertainment called moving pictures. Audiences in their thousands crammed into the Curzon Hall on Suffolk Street to see a two-hour programme of films which roamed from exotic places across the world to footage of their own city, along with live music and performers like Cyrus and Maud and their Educated Donkey. Even the sound-effects were live, with children off-stage banging on lino to create the sound of gun-shots! A century later, the Flatpack Festival is opening with a tribute to this unique showman, right around the corner from the venue where the original shows took place.

The event will be hosted by fifteen-piece band The Destroyers, formed at Birmingham Conservatoire and a hugely popular fixture on the festival circuit. They will playing a live score to the sort of films which you might have found at the ‘Curzonora’ shows, from the very first sci-fi movies (_Trip to the Moon_) and thrillers (_The Great Train Robbery_) to dramatic recreations from the Boer War. The lineup will also include films of Birmingham events from the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection, commissioned by Jeffs himself and not seen in the city for over a hundred years.

The third Flatpack Festival runs from 11-15 March, with an eclectic mix of shorts, animation, features, live events and installations in venues across Birmingham. Full programme info is available at www.flatpackfestival.org.uk