Flatpack Festival
Film for all the senses

International Space Orchestra

Friday 29th March, 2013

The Electric Cinema Screen 2 | 20:30 - 22:15

A group of space scientists from NASA form an orchestra, to perform a piece based on the Apollo 11 mission.

The idea behind the International Space Orchestra is simple, if implausible: to gather a group of space scientists with musical abilities (from NASA Ames Research Center, SETI, and so on) to develop and perform Ground Control: An Opera in Space, reenacting the difficulties of mission control during Apollo 11. London-based French experience designer Nelly Ben Hayoun, whose previous work includes a volcano built in her living room, somehow pulls it off, her enthusiasm and charm winning over astrophysicists and drawing in musical favours from the likes of Bobby Womack, Damon Albarn and Penguin Café. ISO is a film about the way space fires the imagination, and it’s our pleasure to welcome Nelly for this special preview screening.

The screening will open with A Year Along The Abandoned Road (dir: Morten Skallerud, 1991), an incredible 12-minute timelapse short from Norway. Peter Walsh was a cinema programmer in Birmingham for 25 years, first at the Arts Lab and then the Triangle. Sadly he died last year and we’re showing this film, one of his favourites, in memoriam.

Photo credited to Neil Berrett

Dir: Nelly Ben Hayoun (USA 2013, 57 mins)

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