Southend Film Festival
This is a pick’n’mix sort of festival that aims to provide something for everyone, whether your tastes lean towards Hammer horror, Busby Berkeley musicals, Icelandic arthouse cinema or Japanese mods. The strongest suit seems to be new British cinema, albeit of a low-budget indie kind. That at least means Southend can boast the black-tie “world premiere” of Age Of Kill, in which Martin Kemp plays a sniper forced to assassinate six people in as many hours. There’s also Aidan Gillen in neighbourhood violence thriller Still or, for a more end-of-the-pier flavour, local escapologist Stuart Burrell presents an appreciation of Harry Houdini, including his 1922 silent movie oddity The Man From Beyond. The festival proper kicks off on 21 May, but the warm-up starts this week, with screenings of Mr Turner, Birdman and Singin’ In The Rain, among others.
Various venues, Sun to 25 May
Science Flicktion, London
Why do zombies only die when you destroy their brain? Could an alien have acid for blood? Would a robot from the future really speak with an Austrian accent? These questions and more possibly answered at this novel event, which mixes science education, comedy and activities through the medium of crowd-pleasing movies. Screenings of Alien, Apollo 13 and Terminator 2 are presented by scientists and comedians (including the Guardian’s Adam Rutherford and Helen Keen, host of the first-ever comedy night at Cern), mixed up with live experiments and enlightening scientific commentary. Sounds better than revision, doesn’t it?
Chelsea Town Hall, SW3, Fri to 17 May
The Past Is A Foreign Country, Brighton
Here’s a novel theme for a film season: the cinema of re-enactment. More than just a chance to play dress-up on the village green, re-enactment can be a powerful tool of protest and historical re-evaluation. Recent doc The Act Of Killing, which encouraged the perpetrators of Indonesia’s genocide to re-enact their crimes, is a perfect illustration. That plays here alongside Jeremy Deller’s miners’ strike reconstruction The Battle Of Orgreave, Peter Watkins’s recreation of the battle of Culloden as a media event, and The Silent Village, a wartime restaging of a Nazi massacre in a Welsh mining village.
Old Wood Yard, Thu to 17 May
Industrial Soundtrack For The Urban Decay, Manchester, Belfast & Glasgow
After working in a factory all day, why would you go home and listen to really noisy music? This new documentary attempts to find the answer. Industrial music fused low-budget creativity with the more anarchic currents of the European avant garde: dadaism, musique concrète, krautrock and Burroughs cut-ups. Film-makers Amélie Ravalec and Travis Collins tell the history through key figures such as Throbbing Gristle, SPK and Test Department. They’ll be talking to the audience in Manchester tonight, then the film tours nationwide. Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder accompanies the Brighton screening on 16 May.
Band On The Wall, Manchester, Sat; Green Room, Belfast, Sun; Art School, Glasgow, Wed; industrialsoundtrack.com
