European Premiere at GFF23 TODAY

Jonas Chernick (Ashgrove, James vs. His Future Self) returns to GFF starring alongside the wonderful Emily Hampshire (Schitts Creek) in Sean Garrity’s latest comedy about a married couple desperate to reignite the spark in their now routine marriage.

When Josh and Emma send their kids off to camp for the week, they are quickly faced with the realisation that their sex life has grown stale. In a bid to reinvigorate their relationship, the pair embark on a sexual adventure and with the help of a host of colourful characters begin to see their marriage through a whole new lens.

The screening on Thursday 2 March will be followed by a Q&A with Jonas Chernick and Sean Garrity, hosted by Chris Kumar.

This smart sex comedy is not to be missed. A clever comedy with truth and wit - bit.ly/GFF23_EndofSex

UK Premiere

Following the capers and misfortunes of Icelandic female punk collective The Post Performance Blues Band, blends fact and fiction to delightful ends.

'Bandmates Álfrún, Saga and Hrefna give themselves one year to make it big or leave the business for good, with the film documenting their make-it-or-break-it pursuit for unattainable fame. Spinal Tap meets Flight of the Conchords meets Bjork in Örnólfsdóttir’s sometimes deep but always hilarious docu-allegory'

See the film then see the band! At #GFF23 The Post Performance Blues Band will be performing at Nice N' Sleazys with a whole host of local talent.

Get tickets to the film for free entry to this night of music greatness - glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-film-festival/shows/band-nc-15

Lee Grant's documentaries are rich portraits on trailblazing subjects - taking a direct and empathetic eye to the systematic and cultural horrors being perpetuated in contemporary America.

The year in which the film was made, 1,500 women were being killed each year in America by a husband or a boyfriend. BATTERED offers an unflinching portrait of this epidemic of domestic violence.

Grant's documentaries bring a voice to the voiceless and you can see them soon at GFF23 as part of our retrospective honouring her work.

Tickets here

This list is all the films shown so far from first at bottom to the top film which is always whatever is coming next - www.glasgowfilm.org/scorsese

We started last June and we ain't stopping 'til we're done!

• The Aviator

  June 2024

• Kundun

  May 2024

• The Irishman

  April 2024

• After Hours

  March 2024

• Gangs of New York

  February 2024

• Italianamerican

  January 2024

• Bringing Out the Dead

  December 2023

• The Departed

  November 2023

• Mean Streets

  October 2023

• The King of Comedy

  September 2023

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Glasgow’s original independent cinema, we first opened our doors as the Cosmo 85 years ago, on 18 May 1939, and became Glasgow Film Theatre as you know it today, 50 years ago, on 2 May 1974. This year also marks the 20th edition of Glasgow Film Festival, which took place in March 2024.

• Roma
• Escape from New York
• Jean de Florette
• Manon of the Spring
• Cinema Paradiso
• The Lives of Others
• In the Mood for Love
• Calamity Jane
• Aftersun
• 2001: A Space Odyssey

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Here it is, the FULL GFF24 Programme! (Except for the films not yet on Letterboxd).

• A History of Violence
• A House in Jerusalem
• A So-Called Archive
• About Dry Grasses
• After Hours
• All You Need Is Death
• Asog
• Baby Assassins 2 Babies
• Banel & Adama
• The Beast

...plus 109 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

2024 is a year of celebration; it is 85 years since the Cosmo first opened its doors as the UK’s first purpose-built arthouse cinema outside of London. It is half a century since the regeneration of the Cosmo into the Glasgow Film Theatre, and it is the 20th edition of the Glasgow Film Festival.

Those anniversaries have inspired a special 2024 Festival retrospective of 10 titles marking those key dates - 1939, 1974 and 2005 when the Festival started.

• Only Angels Have Wings

  Thursday 29 February
  Essay - boxd.it/SIl

• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

  Friday 1 March

• Wuthering Heights

  Saturday 2 March

• Ninotchka

  Sunday 3 March

• The Godfather: Part II

  Monday 4 March

• Young Frankenstein

  Tuesday 5 March

• Foxy Brown

  Wednesday 6 March

• Brick

  Thursday 7 March

• A History of Violence

  Friday 8 March

• Walk the Line

  Sunday 10 March

• Radiator

  GFF15

• Mustang

  GFF16

• Lipstick Under My Burkha

  GFF17

• Custody

  GFF18

• Harry Birrell Presents: Films of Love & War

  GFF19

• Monster

  GFF20

• Sweetheart

  GFF21

• The Hermit of Treig

  GFF22

• Riceboy Sleeps

  GFF23

• The Home Game

  GFF24

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Read the programme notes here - glasgowfilmfest.org/what-will-the-men-wear-programme-notes

• The Philadelphia Story
• Morocco
• Queen Christina

1. Stop Making Sense
2. Gregory's Girl
3. National Theatre Live: Fleabag
4. Local Hero
5. The Exorcist

1. Oppenheimer
2. Barbie
3. Asteroid City
4. Saltburn
5. TÁR
6. Past Lives
7. Killers of the Flower Moon
8. Women Talking
9. God's Creatures
10. The Whale

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Here's our full list of 2023 faves from everyone at GFF. What a year! What a list!

• May December
• TÁR
• How to Have Sex
• Barbie
• Killers of the Flower Moon
• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
• Flag
• Anatomy of a Fall
• BlackBerry
• Blue Jean

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This was the FULL GFF23 Programme! (Except for the films not yet on Letterboxd).

A fantastic year, and a programme to die for. Catch these films when you can and look forward to GFF2024!

Films not on Letterboxd yet:
-GROUNDING
-BLACK CORPOREAL
-IN THE HOUSE OF NAMES
-DANIEL
-DOG DAYS

• Girl
• On the Fringe
• Prison 77
• Lullaby
• It Happened One Night
• The Piano
• Roman Holiday
• Bonnie and Clyde
• Battered
• Down and Out in America

...plus 114 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From some of the best films of all time, to our Gloria Grahame series, and two of the most anticipated new releases of the festival. Check them out and get your tickets now. - bit.ly/GFF_SaverScreenings

DOG DAYS (James Price) not currently on Letterboxd.

• Bonnie and Clyde

  FREE

• It Happened One Night

  FREE

• Julia

  FREE

• The Piano

  FREE

• Pierrot le Fou

  FREE

• Roman Holiday

  FREE

• The Sugarland Express

  FREE

• Thelma & Louise

  FREE

• Vagabond

  FREE

• Widows

  FREE

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Hit the link here and find out more about some of the fantastic films coming to Glasgow. Read the reviews here and get excited for 1-12 March when you can see these beauties - www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/festivals/glasgow/2023/a-z

Once you've been sold on some films you can grab your tickets now - glasgowfilm.org/festival

• The Birds
• Country Gold
• Driving Mum
• The Dirties
• Eismayer
• The End of Sex
• Girl
• Human Desire
• The Kings of the World
• Motherhood

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Please suggest more titles in the comments. What other horror films are shapes and vice versa? (Does that make any sense?)

UPDATE: We discovered there was a Cube remake.

Also shout out to Christopher Smith's Triangle as his latest film CONSECRATION will be playing GFF23!

• Cube
• Cube 2: Hypercube
• Cube Zero
• Triangle
• Sphere
• Circle
• The Box
• Ring
• Ring 2
• Ring 0

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Please make any suggestions as this is a building work in progress!

• Madeleine
• The 'Maggie'
• Seawards the Great Ships
• That Sinking Feeling
• A Sense of Freedom
• Death Watch
• Comfort and Joy
• Heavenly Pursuits
• Govan Ghost Story
• Down Among the Big Boys

...plus 36 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

To mark the release of the Canadian actor, writer and director's first feature in a decade, Women Talking, we're delighted to be screening a showcase of three of her most outstanding directorial features, as well as a special late night screening of 2004's Dawn of the Dead in which she gives a thrilling starring performance.

Presented in partnership with feminist collective Invisible Women. Programme notes by Invisible Women on the Sarah Polley season will be available in early February.

Tickets for the full season are on sale now, and links to the films and how to book are below in the notes.

• Away from Her

  15 - 23 February

  Tickets - glasgowfilm.org/shows/away-from-her-12a

• Take This Waltz

  16 - 22 February

  Tickets - glasgowfilm.org/shows/take-this-waltz-15

• Dawn of the Dead

  Late Night - 17 February

  Tickets - glasgowfilm.org/shows/late-night-dawn-of-the-dead-2004-35mm-18

• Stories We Tell

  26 - 28 February

  Tickets - glasgowfilm.org/shows/stories-we-tell-12a

• Women Talking

  10 - 28 February

  Tickets - glasgowfilm.org/shows/women-talking-15

So... we decided to ask people working for Glasgow Film and Glasgow Film Festival, what are your favourite films?

This is not to make our own canon, or counter anyone else, but simply a reflection of the range of films adored by the folks at Glasgow Film. Everyone has their own definition of greatness, or favourite, and some don't see any difference between the two, so we all went by our own definitions and chose the films that reflected us.

So here they are; Glasgow Film's Favourite Films.

Check them out in video form here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO89xohi3JM&feature=youtu.be

• Some Like It Hot

  Katie M
  Front of House

• Return to Oz

  Katie M
  Front of House

• Howl's Moving Castle

  Katie M
  Front of House

• The Odd Couple

  Katie M
  Front of House

• The Sound of Music

  - Katie M, Front of House
  - Debbie Aitken, GFF Festival Manager

• Lost in Translation

  - Katie M, Front of House

  - Paul Gallagher, GFT Programmer

• Ghost World

  Katie M
  Front of House

• Rushmore

  - Katie M, Front of House

  - Christopher Kumar, GFF Programmer - Not only did this film open my teenage eyes to indie cinema but also became the comfort blanket for the sad emo boy inside me

• The Big Lebowski

  Katie M
  Front of House

• American Beauty

  Katie M
  Front of House

...plus 166 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Alongside JEANNE, we're also screening a selection of favourites from the list, including VERTIGO, CITIZEN KANE, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. A restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s RASHOMON also screens, as well as both David Lynch films on the list: BLUE VELVET and MULHOLLAND DRIVE. We're also celebrating the arrival of one of our favourite recent films on the list with a late night screening of Bong Joon-ho's PARASITE.

See notes for dates.

Check it out and see some fantastic cinema - glasgowfilm.org/shows/the-greatest-films-of-all-time

• Mulholland Drive

  6-8 January

• Rashomon

  6-12 January

• Blue Velvet

  4K. 7-10 January

• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

  8 January

• Citizen Kane

  15 January

• Vertigo

  4K - 18 January

• Parasite

  Late Night - 20 January

• 2001: A Space Odyssey

  4K - 22 January

• Man with a Movie Camera

  24 January

Take 2 is our weekly family film and Take 2 Access is our monthly neurodivergent friendly family film.

At Take 2 and Take 2 Access every child under the age of 14 will receive a free ticket, and one free ticket for per one accompanying adult :) - glasgowfilm.org/shows/take-2-family-friendly-films

• The Red Turtle
• Encanto
• The Mitchells vs. The Machines
• Sing 2
• Ron's Gone Wrong

www.glasgowfilm.org

• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
• Get Carter
• What's Up, Doc?
• Paper Moon
• Queen Christina
• Salvatore Giuliano
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
• The Age of Innocence
• Fury

Front of House operative Katy Thomson's favourite film of the year is the extraordinary documentary/animation hybrid FLEE, which was nominated for three Academy Awards

'FLEE should be on the curriculum of every school in the country'

• Moonage Daydream
• My Old School
• Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
• McEnroe
• Rebel Dread
• Flee

'I thought MY OLD SCHOOL was one of the funniest, most off-beat films of 2022. A true gem!'

Stuarts list also includes 'NOTES FROM A LOW ORBIT' - not on LB

• My Old School
• Aftersun
• A Cat Called Dom
• Winners

What a year for film! From top to bottom there's brilliant works to discover and rediscover. Can't wait to see what 2023 brings us.

1. The Banshees of Inisherin
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once
3. Aftersun
4. Decision to Leave
5. Licorice Pizza
6. Glass Onion
7. The Worst Person in the World
8. Happening
9. Compartment No. 6
10. Nope

...plus 50 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

There’s a scene in A History of Violence where Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) comforts his daughter in the aftershocks of a nightmare, he tells her, “There’s no such thing as monsters”. It’s a tender yet quietly unsettling moment - whilst Tom may not be lying to her, we can’t help but sense he isn’t telling her the whole truth. It perfectly foreshadows a story which seems simple, but hides a much more complicated view of humanity.

David Cronenberg is widely considered to be the master of body horror and for good reason, few other filmmakers have shown such fervent dedication to fleshing out our fears of the human anatomy than him: from the bombastic mutations of The Fly, to the intimate augmentations of Crash. If the body is a temple, it is one that the Canadian auteur has dedicated his career to desecrating with fearless abandon.

This is why initially A History of Violence may seem like an outlier in Cronenberg’s filmography; trading the outlandish worlds of sci-fi and horror, for a functionally minimalist noir/thriller - that is to say, no one has a gun that shoots human teeth. However, Cronenberg is just as concerned with the body in this film as he is in any other, and it too centres around a grotesque transformation that reveals a violating truth about the human makeup.

Cronenberg’s obsession with mutilating that which we consider sacred, is born out of his desire to dissect our internalised taboos. Throughout his filmography, he jabs at the parts of ourselves we don’t like to think about - organs, blood, fluids - exposing the crude irony of feeling disgust at things that form part of our very being. In A History of Violence, Cronenberg looks to do the same with another deeply human impulse: violence.

Throughout the film, we watch as family man Tom Stall transforms, or regresses, into Joey Cusack: a man defined by his aptitude for killing. His transformation is metaphysical, the only discernable physical change we can see is a once soft light behind his eyes slowly growing absent. Mortensen’s uncanny ability to seamlessly transition between sensitive and rugged masculinity, one he mastered in his role as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is weaponised to great effect here.

As such, it would be easy to file this film under “yet another white male rage movie”. However, that would overlook the various ways that A History of Violence subverts, and even transcends the limited idea of violence as a purely masculine energy. Cronenberg isn’t interested in categorising violence: who it is perpetrated by, whether it is right or wrong; instead, by distilling it cinematically into its purest form, he forces us to re-examine our own relationship with it.

The masterful shoot-out in the diner is punctuated by a shot of a man lying face-down, sputtering his final breaths through a gaping hole of viscera. It’s a revolting image trapped within a heroic context - whilst Tom’s actions may seem justifiable, righteous even given the murderous cruelty we witnessed these men display at the film’s opening, we still squirm in our seats at this visual. By teasing an audience’s desire to see this man be punished - Cronenberg proves that the desire for violence exists in all of us, then by showing us the consequences of that desire, he demonstrates that violence is yet another part of our biology that we are not wholly aligned with.

The violent transformation of Tom Stall is one of grim inevitability, yet the real horror lies not in his own degradation, but watching it happen to those he loves. In the wake of his acts, both his wife and son demonstrate not only their capacity to commit violence, but to find small glimpses of satisfaction in it: whether through the domination of an agressor, or in newfound sexual desire. By the time we reach the film’s end, the family is united as much by unconditional love, as by mutual acceptance of their own violent urges.

There is a much more dreadful truth that Tom Stall held from his daughter, not just that there are monsters in this world, or that he might be one of them, but that everyone - including her - has the means to be just like him. 

Ewan Shand
Film writer and video essayist

Classic noir, which thrived in the 1940s and 1950s, was born from pulp crime novels and a generally-felt suspicion and dissatisfaction with how law and order was maintained. In American noir, we see a bleak, sensual and expressionist reflection of societal upheaval that was more interested in shades of grey than crisp black-and-white. Decades on, filmmakers who came of age during noir’s heyday began to update their favourite hardboiled stories – think the psychologically and visually ambitious worlds of Thief, Chinatown, The Long Goodbye – contributing to the nebulous “neo-noir” genre that has persisted for much longer than noir’s original lifetime.

Like many neo-noir filmmakers, Knives Out and The Last Jedi filmmaker Rian Johnson has harboured an obsession with hardboiled detectives for a long time. His low-budget debut Brick is a pure, loving expression of Johnson’s obsession with the novels of Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon). Brick is a noir world localised within a high school, where football jocks and theatre kids take the role of femme fatales and criminal thugs. Brick pulses with an erratic, youthful energy without breaking its dedication to a serious, morally dubious world, in the process revealing why young people want to play pretend at being grown-ups.

Teenager Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) acts as a self-elected private eye in his quiet Southern Californian high school after his girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) goes missing. As he navigates the adolescent underworld, one noticeably lacking any adult supervision or authority, it’s not just grief and amorality that rise to the surface – you can feel Brendan push up against the clearly limited agency that high schoolers are afforded, even when they brush up with society’s darkest elements.

A crucial element to any hardboiled detective is powerlessness – they are not cops, nor magistrates or politicians, and solving a mystery doesn’t guarantee peace and justice will prevail. A hard-boiled detective is most likely to be left with the charged, volatile baggage left over from resolving a case; with Brendan, the messy aftermath of Emily’s death is multiplied by the fact he is a teenager, and is therefore unable to process even the lightest emotional anguish.

Pay attention to Brendan’s physicality, flitting between a still, hunched silhouette and frenzied, scrambling movement – he often feels like a cartoon sketch who intermittently bursts into jagged animation. (Something mirrored in the equally young director’s visual style: you can’t miss Brick’s breathless cuts and eye-catching composition.) When Brendan picks a fight with jock Brad (Brian White) to get the attention of a local drug pusher, he doesn’t seem overly concerned with his lack of fighting prowess – the blows he takes only encourages him to fight dirtier and overextend himself.

There is a bristling, unfettered energy inside him that feels quintessentially youthful, but never joyful or optimistic. But when he rests in the bed of sympathetic dame Laura (Nora Zehetner), he makes the very un-Humphrey Bogart choice to burst into tears. There’s something deeply moving about realising that the body and mind of our private eye has not been built strong enough to withstand the burdens of delving into a crime that feels personal and cruel.

But if they’re not suited for it, why does everyone pretend to live in a noir world at all? Well, precisely because they’re not suited for the world around them. In noir, everyone acts in self-interest, motivated by the self-serving cruelty of forces greater than them. For the youth of tomorrow, embracing a noir-tinged fantasy may only deepen the individualistic gulfs separating them from their peers, but it gives the illusion of agency. Brick becomes not just an experiment in high school noir, but a lesson in both its appeal and shortcomings.

Rory Doherty
Film critic and screenwriter

Against red, blue, purple, a piercing neon green, she wears: a gold and black panelled top, ballooned sleeves and flowing trousers; a bikini; a red jumpsuit; a feathered top; and, a black leather trouser suit, punctuated with a kick and a gunshot. ‘She’s super bad,’ repeats the sweet, climbing tenor of Willie Hutch. The opening credits of Jack Hill’s Foxy Brown (1974) announces Foxy (Pam Grier) as a true force within the numerous, shifting spaces she occupies, while declaring her impeccable style as inseparable from this power. 

Following the murder of her boyfriend, Foxy Brown seeks revenge on a Los Angeles crime ring by infiltrating from within. A blaxploitation film, Foxy Brown isn’t an easy but a truly radical watch. Retribution is realised – and defiantly realised by an independent Black woman in unwavering heels and perfectly tailored flares. 

Distinctly feminine clothing secures Foxy’s power upon her introduction. Late at night, her brother calls, pleading for help. Disgruntled and a little apathetic, she pulls herself out of bed and, neatly tucks a gun into her bra. It’s effortless, a well-practised act in which underwear physically holds her power. Hill lets us into Foxy’s secret – what’s really underneath – and so, we’re already in the palm of her hand.

Her boyfriend, Michael (Terry Carter), is similarly awed by her. White upon greying white, Michael’s hospital room is a sterile and cold place until Foxy enters – yellow billowing shirt, yellow blooming flowers. She kisses him, lies with him, until the nurse enters with a yellow bowl, to bathe him. Utilising colour to link the yellow-clad Foxy with symbols of care – the flowers, the bathing bowl – Hill signals her capability to tend to Michael, just like the nurse. Despite the easy punches and cold one-liners, Foxy’s a nurturer and her clothing proclaims this to each room she enters, visibly shifting the tonal balance of the space. Following Michael’s murder, the care demanded to match her headscarf with her shirt while confronting her brother for his betrayal is implicit and bitter sweetly so. Although grieving and angered, Foxy acts with her head and heart as one, tied together in a spilling silk of blues, pinks, and purples. 

But Foxy’s active resistance relies upon others’ wardrobes, also. On first entering ring-leader Katherine’s (Kathryn Loder) layer as one of her sex workers, Foxy is draped in a long red jumpsuit - notably, Katherine’s signature colour. A dislodging of power follows, with Foxy teasing the dress off while under the eyes of Steve (Peter Brown), Katherine’s lover. She’s all charm and he’s entirely mesmerised, even when she strips down to her light blue underwear, polar to Katherine’s deep red.

Dressing, undressing: Hill is keen to highlight the importance of the latter, also. Foxy’s removal of a corrupt judge’s suit trousers and love-hearted pants see him utterly - and comedically - degraded in a hotel corridor. It’s site specific, his humiliation reliant upon a public entrapment. However, later sent to Katherine’s ranch as punishment for this rebellion, Foxy is drugged and raped by its inhabitants, a group of cruel men. Her clothes are torn and dirtied, her skin exposed. On freeing herself, she tears the ranch men’s blue and white striped shirts from clothes hangers, undressing them one by one. Twisted into something sharp and unforgiving, Foxy uses the hangers to stab one of the ranch men in the eyes. An undressing is returned and used against them; they are killed and her freedom is reclaimed.

“I want justice for all of them,” says Foxy, softly. In taking on the ruling drug lords, she reclaims the city for herself and her community. Style is utilised, and radically so, confirming her agency and its impact on the spaces around her. Her clothes are a reminder that through it all - the violence, the grief - she’s still here, she’s still Foxy, against all odds.  

Eilidh Akilade
Film journalist

Weekend: Sunday 28 April, 7:30pm
Bad Education: Sunday 26 May, 7pm
Desert Hearts: Sunday 30 June, 7.30pm

In February 2020, GFT previewed Céline Sciamma’s now iconic lesbian love drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire. In a packed Cinema One screening, a wonderful range of people huddled together to watch something breathtaking. I personally hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. When the film came to end, the audience sat in stunned silence for a moment before breaking out into a rapturous applause. The energy in the cinema, a celebration of queer filmmaking and storytelling, was magnetic.

A few years previously in 2017, Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight, a thoughtful intersectional exploration of queer sexuality and identity won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and later the same year Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name saw audiences flock to the cinema to see Timothée Chalamet’s heart get broken by an older man.

Around this time perhaps marks a shift in queer cinema which has now spilled over to the mainstream and is much more present at award ceremonies and in popular culture than in previous years. A recent boom in lesbian genre films such as Bottoms, Drive-Away Dolls, and Love Lies Bleeding, and indie hits such as Passages and All of Us Strangers indicates an increasing range of films with queer characters and stories which are flooding the big screen and reaching wider audiences.

Now seems like as exciting a time as ever to dive into the rich catalogue of LGBTQ+ cinema which is what Queer Cinema Sundays is offering. A screening on the last Sunday of the month will allow audiences a chance to discover and rediscover their favourite queer films in the shared space of the cinema. The first three films that have been selected offer a short anti-chronological introduction to the season.

After the success of Andrew Haigh’s moving portrayal of gay love and identity in All of Us Strangers earlier this year, it is fitting to revisit his earlier, more subdued 2011 feature film Weekend. It follows a mild-mannered lifeguard, Russell (Tom Cullen), who meets Glen (Chris New), a politically outspoken aspiring artist, at a gay club and the two hit it off after a one-night stand. Just when the connection begins to feel promising, Glen reveals that he is moving to the US for an art course at the end of the weekend. Over the next precious few hours that they spend together, the two men unravel each other, exploring their different relationships with their gay identities by talking through their past sexual encounters and relationships, gay politics, and coming out. In one particularly moving scene, Glen roleplays as Russell’s father — allowing him the chance to come out to his parent, an opportunity he never got as he grew up in the foster care system. ‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ he tells Russell. ‘I love you just the same.’ The bittersweet scene fuses loss and the complexity of family dynamics for queer people — themes Haigh would later expand on in All of Us Strangers.

The way that Haigh intimately portrays the inner lives and feelings of these two men is striking. For an art project, Glen has his one-night stands record themselves speaking about the previous night’s encounters. Not dissimilarly, Russell writes private notes on his thoughts and feelings after sleeping with men. In a review at the time for Little White Lies, Paul Weedon speculated that Weekend could be ‘challenging to sell to mainstream audiences’ but nonetheless hailed Haigh as an exciting new voice in LGBTQ+ filmmaking. Like Weedon’s prediction about the film, Glen smirks that straight people wouldn’t be interested in his art project about gay life and sex. The same cannot be said for All of Us Strangers which explores similar themes but was a critical and popular success, perhaps indicating a significant cultural shift in the time between the two films.

The following screening for Queer Cinema Sundays will be Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 melodramatic noir Bad Education. Almodóvar is not only one of Europe’s most distinctive working directors but has contributed a significant body of work which explores queer identities in his films such as Law of Desire (1987), All About My Mother (1999), Pain and Glory (2019) and his recent short film Strange Way of Life (2023).

Bad Education, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in May, stars Gael García Bernal as Ignacio, an actor, now going by the name Angel who pays a visit to filmmaker and first love Enrique (Fele Martínez) with a script based on their childhood together at a Catholic boarding school where they suffered at the hands of a tyrannous priest. The film soon unravels into a story-within-a-story narrative with sensational twists and a blur between fiction and reality. With a suspenseful Hitchcockian score and nods to classical Hollywood film noirs (in one scene two of the characters hide out in a cinema which is screening a film noir season), Almodóvar adds his signature bright colour palette and melodrama to this classical genre.

Bad Education was the first Spanish film to open Cannes Film Festival and contains many of the key signifiers of the auteur’s work, such as a campy collaged aesthetic, a non-linear narrative structure, challenging themes, and an interest in subverting sexual and gendered norms. As Roger Ebert wrote while reviewing the film in 2004, the film does not ‘have a statement to make about homosexuality, which for Almodóvar is no more of a topic than heterosexuality is for Clint Eastwood.’ Despite these complex components, Almodóvar is not only a critically acclaimed director, but his films have a long-standing popularity amongst indie cinema audiences. Bad Education, from which Almodóvar drew upon his own experiences at a Catholic boarding school, exemplifies the director’s qualities as a queer auteur at their best.

In June, just in time for Pride Month, the Queer Cinema Sundays screening will be Donna Deitch’s iconic 1985 film Desert Hearts. Regarded as the first film to present a positive portrayal of a lesbian relationship and one which grants its leading couple a happy ending, Desert Hearts is a must-see sensation of queer filmmaking. As a predecessor to the New Queer Wave cinema of the 1990s — where a fertile ground for independent filmmaking saw a rise in films with LGBTQ+ themes and characters — Desert Hearts was for some time one of the few films where queer women could see themselves represented in a positive and overt way. According to B. Ruby Rich, video clips from the film were screened in lesbian bars in the US repetitively.

Desert Hearts was independently produced, financed, and directed by Donna Deitch and filmed beautifully by cinematographer Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood). The film follows a highly-strung English Professor Vivian (Helen Shaver) who arrives in Reno, Nevada in 1959 to legalise her divorce. There she meets the younger and free-spirited Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) whose openness and charm win over Vivian’s heart.

Despite being such a trailblazing film, Desert Hearts, like a lot of women-directed features, goes through waves of being forgotten and rediscovered. A 2017 Criterion Collection restoration and the rise of film clips being shared among younger film enthusiasts on social media platforms such as TikTok, has breathed new life into the film in recent years. Nearly 40 years later, there are still so few films like this one.

The hope for this season is to explore the rich history of LGBTQ+ films on the big screen with a shared audience. From classics to underseen gems, Queer Cinema Sundays will offer audiences the chance to see an LGBTQ+ film every month and explore the unique perspectives offered by queer filmmaking.

Rosie Beattie, Film Programmer
22 April 2024

Click here to book your tickets for the films in our Queer Cinema Sundays programme.
 
SUPPORT GFT WITH £50 FOR OUR 50TH BIRTHDAY

Whilst our box office and bar sales only cover around 50% of our annual costs and help keep the film reels rolling, we rely on donations and fundraising to run our education and community activities. We need your help! Celebrate 50 years of GFT by donating £50. A £50 donation secures your seat at our special January screening. Find out more or donate via glasgowfilm.org/donate.

Shape the next 50 years of independent film. Your contribution matters. 

In this era of modern filmmaking more films are becoming more profitable than original. Perhaps this is mainly due to the progressive technological growth that is continuing to shape and develop the films we see on our screens, but nevertheless originality is something we crave when going to the cinema. As part of Glasgow Film Festival’s 20th Anniversary edition retrospective season, Young Frankenstein is a film that was beyond its years. It’s humorous, unconventional, yet full of heart.

Released in 1975, the American comedy horror became an instant classic. Based loosely on Mary Shelley’s iconic character Frankenstein from her 1818 novel of the same name, Young Frankenstein’s premise focuses on medical lecturer Dr Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) who learns he has inherited his grandfather’s eerie estate in Transylvania. Upon arriving and falling for its charm, Dr Frankenstein decides to recreate his grandfather’s experiments and create his very own monster.

While Young Frankenstein is of course another rendition to the adaptations of Shelley’s work, the collaboration between Wilder and Brooks enabled the duo to take the narrative to new heights. Wilder not only acts as the film’s leading man but co-wrote the script alongside Brooks. In 1972, Wilder had the initial idea of a fresh take on Frankenstein, one where the protagonist was someone entirely new to the story - the grandson of Victor Frankenstein. With the help of his agent, the actor went on to write the first four pages of the screenplay. Brooks, who was originally disinterested in the project, eventually jumped on board to help Wilder complete and finalise a script that would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1975.

The film challenges the norms of adapting stories repeatedly to its audiences. By the time of the film’s release there had already been more than a dozen adaptations of the novel, including Frankenstein (1910) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) to name a few. Ultimately, Young Frankenstein acts as a parody of the Universal Monster’s franchise and all the money they spent on characters such as Frankenstein. But not only was creating a parody enough, Brook’s decision to make the film in black and white during a period that colour film was thriving should be applauded, taking yet another swipe at the distributor’s typical horror flicks.

Young Frankenstein’s success as a spoof is down to its genuine comedic factor. Typically, in Frankenstein, the scientist’s sidekick Igor is a minor role with no actor really providing unforgettable performance until Marty Feldman came along with his utterly unique and comedic take on the character. Ironically, compared to Wilder’s role, Feldman was the one to deliver some of the films most hilarious lines – for example, ‘Walk this way’, which went on to inspire Aerosmith for the title of a song.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will always be regarded as one of the best gothic pieces of literature to ever exist, paving the way for audiences to visualise her iconic monster on the big screen. Perhaps the real take from Shelley’s work is that we must defy the conventions of our creators. Thus, this is why Young Frankenstein has continued to be successful more than four decades on. 

Natasha Jagger
Film journalist and programmer

Any cinephile worth their salt knows of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece The Godfather (1972) and its sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974). Both are often heralded as the greatest films to be shown on the silver screen; both achieving Best Picture at their respective Academy Awards and the former earning the silver slot on the American Film Institute ranked list of greatest films. Beloved by so many, they were an easy target for Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar box office behemoth Barbie (2023) to playfully poke fun at. It also means that any filmmaker who so happens to find themselves caught in the giant shadow that these gangster epics cast, find themselves with a difficult task. Whether that is imitating The Godfather as pastiche or in the case of Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford’s own progeny, who followed in her father’s filmmaking footsteps.

One of the main themes dealt with in The Godfather Part II was patrilineal legacy, predominantly focusing on the relationship between father and son, Vito Corleone and Michael Corleone. The film flashes back in time, following a young Robert DeNiro as Vito with Al Pacino in the future timeline as his son, Michael, who takes over the crime family, claiming the title of ‘don’. This theme of following familial lineage works in tandem with the life of Sofia Coppola, who has become a revered filmmaker in her own right. Similar to how Pacino’s Michael Corleone is indoctrinated into running the family business from a young age, filmmaking was imbued into Coppola from birth, having acted in her first movie –The Godfather – at only a few weeks old. Between her documentarian mother and the time spent on her father’s film sets, the Cambodian jungles of Apocalypse Now (1979) and the New York streets of The Godfather Part III, Sofia couldn’t help but be curious about directing, going on to direct critically acclaimed films such as romantic comedy Lost In Translation (2003) and, most recently, the Priscilla Presley biopic Priscilla (2023).

Fathers and daughters are a theme that Sofia has used within her work often, using her own relationship with her father for Somewhere (2010) and On the Rocks (2020). She navigates this theme in The Virgin Suicides (1999), and even in Priscilla, as she explores the relationship between Elvis and his wife Priscilla. The latter whose life transforms from impressionable teen to subservient wife to ultimately shrinking away that dynamic for a sense of freedom; a child shedding patriarchal impact. But while Sofia’s filmography sometimes mirrors that of her own relationship with her father, her films are wholly different to her father’s. They are antithetic to her father’s more unflinching work, usually buoyed by an idiosyncratic, pop-infused soundtrack like that of Marie Antoinette (2006) and have a meditative state of melancholy and unwavering, fashionable sense of cool, of which Francis’ films rarely achieved. It has helped signify the distance between herself and her patronage, giving Sofia her own unique voice.

Like Michael Corleone, who finds himself shaking away the tendrils of Vito’s impact as the paterfamilias, Sofia has done the same with her father Francis. While The Godfather Part II will stay in the public zeitgeist as one of the greatest films of all time, Sofia parallels the journey Michael Corleone goes on. They both reclaim their autonomy as their own people, embracing and rejecting fragments of their heritage. In doing so, they both become a tremendous, powerful voice. Whether that be in Corleone’s criminal underworld or in the follies of Hollywood, Michael and Sofia have both escaped the long, encompassing shadow that The Godfather, that of Vito or allegorically Francis, has cast. 

Connor Lightbody
Film critic and programmer

For almost a decade, Greta Garbo was the Queen of Hollywood. Poached from Sweden by Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios and brought to America amid intense hype, she dominated silent cinema before successfully making the leap to talkies and becoming one of the biggest earners in the business. By 1939, however, her star-status was waning. Following a few flops, she was one of the many actors to be infamously deemed ‘box office poison’ by independent theatre owners. Legendary for her portrayals of tragic women like Anna Karenina and Mata Hari, she’d become seen by audiences as a bit of a drag: you didn’t go to a Garbo film for a fun time. So, what better way to revive the fortunes of her career than with her first full-on comedy? 

The Ninotchka of the title is a Soviet envoy played by Garbo who is sent to Paris to ensure the sale of priceless jewellery confiscated from the aristocracy during the Russian Revolution. A trio of bumbling trade envoys oversee the operation, but this matter is complicated by the presence of a former Russian noblewoman, and rightful owner of the jewels, who is working in the hotel where the trio are staying. The noblewoman’s dashing lover, Count Léon d’Algout, decides to introduce Ninotchka to the joys of champagne, parties, and illicit romance, all in the hopes of retrieving the jewels before they are sold. Of course, chaos ensues. 

Released in 1939, Ninotchka put together a murderer’s row of talent to ensure a hit. The cast included Melvyn Douglas, Felix Bressart, and Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi. Billy Wilder, who would soon become one of the greatest directors of all-time, co-wrote the script, and behind the camera was Ernst Lubitsch. The German-born filmmaker would also become renowned for his elegant approach to comedies, both classy and perverse but in ways that slipped by the censors. His deft approach to Hollywood would come to be known as “the Lubitsch Touch” – stories of proper society and fine upstanding people who come into conflict that is usually socially or romantically improper and is dealt with through a sharp wit and failing attempts to stick to protocol. What better director to wring laughs out of a movie about Soviet agents, forbidden love, and the diamond-heavy allure of capitalism? 

Ninotchka was such a big deal to Garbo’s image that the film sold itself based on the seemingly impossible promise: “Garbo Laughs!” She was never the ceaseless miserabilist her harshest critics portrayed her as, but her performance in Ninotckha is undoubtedly joyous in a way that felt so refreshing to pre-WW2 audiences. The sturdy rule-following Ninotchka evolves into a good time gal who finds love and freedom from the confines of her homeland, and throughout it, Garbo is magnetic in her charm. The gamble worked, earning Garbo her third Oscar nomination and some much-needed commercial clout. While it didn’t lead to a renewed chapter in her career – she would retire soon after and become notoriously private for the remaining decades of her life – Ninotchka did help to further secure Garbo’s status as one of the greats.

And Ninotchka itself stands tall as one of the true masterpieces of classic Hollywood comedy. It’s an example of that precious phenomenon when a group of incredible talents at the top of their level get together and make something that could only have been created at this specific moment in time (the film had been banned in the Soviet Union and attempts to re-release the film during the war were cancelled to prevent disarray with the U.S.’s Soviet allies.) Stalin would have hated it, but everyone else loved it. 

Kayleigh Donaldson
Film and cultural critic

Hollywood has always loved a star-studded literary adaptation. William Wyler’s ultra-romantic 1939 reworking of Emily Brontë’s terrifyingly powerful novel still sweeps audiences away 85 years later, remaining faithful in spirit yet smartly adapting to on-screen storytelling. 

Some alterations sand down the book’s sharpest edges (the Hays Code was in effect), but most work within the medium to create a rich 105-minute narrative. The worst cruelties endured and inflicted by Wuthering Heights’ inhabitants are softened, notably the behaviours of star-crossed lovers Catherine (Merle Oberon) and Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier). Here, they are tortured but it falls short of monstrous. Extensive time is devoted to their burgeoning romance and private world on the moors. Alfred Newman’s score gives Cathy a light, bright strings motif while turning the same instruments moody, almost sinister for Heathcliff. The film excises the novel’s second half and generation, keeping focus – and full sympathy – on the doomed romance. 

Audiences in 1939, however, would not have known that a star’s offscreen life mirrored Brontë’s novel. Heathcliff’s outsider status is established not only from his lack of history – Mr Earnshaw says he found the boy on the streets of Liverpool ‘kicked and bruised and almost dead’ – but from others describing his darker skin. In the late 18th century, Liverpool’s port was a hub of colonial commerce; Heathcliff could have arrived as a passenger, stowaway, or slaved person. This gives Hindley Earnshaw and Edgar Linton’s abuse of Healthcliff a racially charged edge; Heathcliff’s vicious desire to assimilate and take revenge on his tormentors becomes a quest for justice.

Olivier is the whitewashed Hollywood Heathcliff, albeit an excellently brooding one. However, Oberon – even more captivating as Cathy – was mixed race and faced an entirely different industry experience to her co-stars. Born in Mumbai (then Bombay) as the daughter of a British officer and a woman of mixed Sri Lankan origin, she concealed her South Asian heritage in 1930s Hollywood, using skin lightening products that damaged her health. Oberon became the first actress of Asian descent to receive a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for The Dark Angel (1935). By the time of Wuthering Heights she was a star at Samuel Goldwyn Productions. Wuthering Heights received eight Academy Awards nominations, including Best Actor for Olivier; strikingly, Best Actress was not among them. It is not hard to believe that, while Oberon’s box office pull was not affected by gossip, the Hollywood elite found one nomination enough for an outsider. 

Cathy imagines a past for Heathcliff: his father was the Emperor of China and his mother an Indian queen. When he returns a ‘gentleman’ after his travels, he echoes this back to her: ‘I went out and claimed my inheritance. It all turned out just as you once suspected, Cathy: that I had been kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England; that I was of noble birth.’ Her fantasy becomes his reclamation. By honouring the bigotry Oberon faced and confirming her place in Hollywood annals, we can broaden understandings of film history and examine the industry’s progress – and lack thereof. Watching Wuthering Heights today, the tragedy of Oberon needing to hide herself is equal to the tragedy on screen. Cathy’s pride and desire to keep with her fellow landed gentry drives her from Heathcliff, then to madness and death. Heathcliff, seeing a futile future, seeks to mire everyone in his misery. Their uncontrollable, unhealthy passion brings about their inevitable end. However, Goldwyn requested a specific final shot: Cathy and Heathcliff as ghosts, free of societal judgement and their own worst selves to wander their beloved moors forever. It is a strange, sad hope, yet, it’s hope nonetheless. 

Carmen Paddock
Film and culture journalist

All we can ever do in our work is write our own biography.' - Dorothy Arzner

Dorothy Arzner (1897 - 1979) is sometimes described as the only woman filmmaker who worked within the studio system during the Hollywood Golden Age, but that’s not totally accurate. Arzner was neither peerless nor without precedent. Early Hollywood had seen a number of women, from Alice Guy-Blaché to Alla Nazimova, work (both credited and uncredited) as directors. Her closest peer Lois Weber — who for a period in 1916 was Universal’s highest paid director — had kept working until the mid-1930s, and it’s worth acknowledging too the creative impact of influential producers and writers, such as Frances Marion, June Mathis and Virginia van Upp, who also played a significant role in shaping US cinema during this foundational period.

Yet it’s true that during a time which was particularly difficult for female directors, Arzner was both the first woman to join the Director’s Guild of America and the first to direct a sound film. After a successful early career as an editor, she moved into the director’s chair in the late 1920s and stayed there for 15 years, serving as sole-director on 16 films and co-directing/working uncredited on several more. That number, although not spectacular, distinguishes her to this day as the most prolific woman studio director in the history of Hollywood. More important than the numbers though, are the films. Arzner’s films are rightly being reclaimed and celebrated today, because of their skill, their cleverness, their quietly subversive messages, and, too, for their sheer enjoyability. Her best pictures slip down like a glass of champagne, even if a rogue bubble — a particularly arch line of dialogue, a disarmingly acute observation — might occasionally catch in the throat.

Even before the Hays Code began to be widely implemented in the mid-1930s, Arzner was already working within a system of codes. As one of very few working women directors, and a queer woman at that, she had to smuggle her own experiences and opinions into the films she made hidden behind ostensibly acceptable heteronormative plots and characters. Yet, despite those limitations, Arzner’s films remain consistently rich and surprising, and it is her sly rejection of social convention that have ensured that her work often feels refreshingly modern.

The first thing you’ll notice when you start watching Arzner’s films are her heroines. Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball; Arzner worked with stars, often early on in their careers, drawing out strong, hard-edged performances which would help establish those future icons as forces to be reckoned with. In Christopher Strong (1933), Katharine Hepburn is cast, in one of her first significant film roles, as an androgynous aviatrix beloved by the public and her male peers, and dressed dashingly (not so unlike Arzner herself) in trousers and a leather flying jacket. Both Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford play transparently scheming, manipulative anti-heroines in Craig’s Wife (1936) and The Bride Wore Red (1937) respectively, two films which, beneath glossy facades, demonstrate brilliantly how the patriarchy forces women to pursue the security of marriage at the expense of their souls. Even Arzner’s more straightforward heroines have a kick to them. In Dance Girl Dance (1940), Maureen O’Hara, so elegant and angelic that she is cast as an aspiring ballerina, actively starts a vicious fist fight. When a sympathetic judge tries to coach her into saying that she was acting in self-defence, O’Hara is delightfully straightforward: ‘Oh no your honour,’ she responds. ‘I wanted to kill her.’

Then, of course there’s Arzner’s delightfully cynical attitude towards marriage. ‘Marriage and children make almost any woman intolerant,’ says an apparently happily married character in Christopher Strong, an acid-tinged line which comes wonderfully, wickedly out of the blue (credit has to be given there to the screenwriter, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Zoe Akins). Hepburn’s Cynthia Darington, so bold, brave and wide open to the world, clearly isn’t cut out to be contained by matrimonial bonds. When she gives up her work at the request of her stuffy older lover, she is consumed by an ennui bound up with the loss of her independence. The idea that love alone, even when accompanied by the promise of possible future marriage and legitimacy, might not be enough, feels like a rebellious message in the face of the usual Hollywood happy ending. Both Craig’s Wife, about a ruthless woman who sacrifices all ethics to secure her marital home, and The Bride Wore Red, in which a nightclub singer masquerades as an aristocrat to trick her way into a high society match, serve to sour fizzy romantic convention. A key plot point in Dance Girl Dance involves an astonishingly dysfunctional divorce played for dark laughs, while elsewhere another character tricks an inebriated playboy into marrying her so she can claim alimony. When he sobers up, she’s already set her price: a cool ＄50,000 dollars in exchange for his freedom.

Dance Girl Dance is the best known of Arzner’s films today, and for good reason. A delightfully entertaining showbiz melodrama, it’s also a rather brilliant assessment of a toxic female friendship which touches a raw nerve in its examination of the brutal ways women can treat one another. Centring on a struggling dance troupe (helmed incidentally by an androgynous, clearly queer coded ballet teacher played by Maria Ouspenskaya, a doppelganger for Arzner herself), the film follows the competitive relationship between the refined Judy (O’Hara) and the vivacious Bubbles (a pre-I Love Lucy Lucille Ball), as the pair are pitted against each other in their professional and personal lives. When Bubbles becomes a burlesque star, she cruelly casts her old friend as her warmup act, paying her a salary she knows Judy can’t refuse to perform a ballet routine to jeers from the inebriated crowd. In one famous scene, Judy turns on the audience, facing outwards to confront her tormentors (and by implication also us, the passive viewer) with a fierce monologue: ‘Go ahead and stare… I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your 50 cents worth… So you can go home when the show is over and strut before your wives and sweethearts, and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see through you just like we do.’

That powerful moment is often held up now as an example of explicit feminist rebellion in Golden Age Hollywood. Arzner did not write the script for Dance Girl Dance; the screenplay is co-credited to New York intellectual and communist Tess Slesinger, alongside Frank Davis, which itself opens some interesting possibilities about the link the film draws between capital and women’s bodies. Nevertheless, that scene is often read as a definitive statement from the director herself, a pre-emptive skewering of the discourse around the male gaze in cinema which would later become central to feminist criticism.
 
Dance Girl Dance was not a critical or commercial success on its first release and signalled a petering out of Arzner’s career. By the mid-1940s, Arzner had left directing for good, ultimately finding work at UCLA film school, where she taught Francis Ford Coppola (he credited her with offering vital encouragement during the early stages of his career). In the 1970s though, Dance Girl Dance began to circulate again in second wave circles, as a new generation found inspiration in the film's proto feminist critique. Decades later Arzner still remains relatively under-appreciated, but thanks to recent restorations her work is slowly becoming more widely available.

This CineMasters season offers only a taste of Arzner’s many brilliant films, but it should be enough to establish the director as one of the greats: a heroine to sit alongside Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor as a quintessential filmmaker of the Golden Age. Just as importantly though, discovering Arzner’s films and her life story provides more vital evidence of the significant role women — as directors, stars, writers, editors and producers — played in building Hollywood’s mythology. Her films have to be made more available to audiences, to be seen more widely, because they radically reshape the way we might approach this kind of classic cinema, and because they have the potential to serve as vital ongoing inspiration to other women and LGBTQ+ filmmakers struggling to find their way in the industry. As Arzner herself definitely never said: ‘Direct Girl, Direct.’

Rachel Pronger, Co-Founder of Invisible Women
10 March 2024

‘Plain, decent, everyday, common rightness’, is what James Stewart’s Jefferson Smith has. ‘And this country could use some of that’. Because, if Mr Smith Goes to Washington is to be believed, by 1939 the ideal of American liberty was under attack by powerful meddlers: corrupt senators, political machines, ambulance chasing journalists. Citizens were at the mercy of those select few who had the might and influence to control elected representatives and newspapers, shaping society as they see fit while holding democracy hostage. 

How times change. 

Almost 100 years later, the gulf between everyday people and self-serving institutions that continue to defend the criminal and morally bankrupt is as wide as it ever was. In the last decade alone, films such as Spotlight, Dark Waters, The Report, Just Mercy, She Said, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and Small Axe’s Mangrove have carried on the spirit of Senator Smith, telling true David versus Goliath stories. These films feature us and our neighbours, standing as the senator stood –literally, for more than 23 hours – against overwhelming odds for what is right. Rather than undermine the integrity of the United States government as it was accused of doing at the time of its release, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington taught us to fight and to believe in better.  

Director Frank Capra’s focus is not on the pros and cons of using land to create a national boys’ camp (a bill introduced by Smith) versus building a dam (part of a graft scheme). Nor is it about opposing ideologies shouting across the chamber. When Smith first arrives in Washington, he runs off to visit The Lincoln Memorial and other sites of significance that pay tribute to the foundations America is built on. He believes in the sanctity of these symbols and what they represent. When he asks his secretary Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur, who, if Stewart is the film’s soul, she is its heart) to identify a certain statue from the back of a car at night, she says, “I wouldn’t know in the daytime”. His pure excitement is constantly met with jaded cynicism from those who know how things are done round these parts, who either benefit from the scheming or can no longer find it in themselves to care. Capra is team Smith. As great as the challenges he makes Smith face are, they both have an unshakeable faith in truth and honesty – and their proximity to goodness. In our current era of fake news and deepfake technology, a film that is not about right versus left, but right versus wrong, is all too pertinent.

Capra more famously believed in the decency of the common individual in It’s A Wonderful Life. His Christmas classic looked at some harsh truths too, notably the existence of Mr Potters in the world, who prioritise greed over everything else. But his darkness cannot withstand the shining light of Stewart’s George Bailey, who is generous, loving, and will leave the world a better place than he found it. Capra likes a happy ending, but not before a sober acknowledgement of how uncaring the world can be. In giving us hard-fought for happy endings, Capra chooses to believe in our collective potential to do right by each other, even against the highest power in the land. 

Smith’s father, it is said, believed the only causes worth fighting for were lost causes. He passed that belief down to his son, who has passed it on to generations of audiences and filmmakers. In these difficult times, may we, together, stand for lost causes. 

Scott Wilson
Film journalist

Spoiler warning: these notes are best read after viewing the film. They contain discussion of plot and character details. 

‘There's no time for me to act mature
The only words I know are "more", "more" and "more”!’
– Le Tigre, ‘Eau D’Bedroom Dancing’

Two best friends, a severed head on ice and a mysterious briefcase – what could go wrong? In Drive-Away Dolls, Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan play Jamie and Marian, a pair of 20-something lesbians on a road trip from Philadelphia to Florida, whose plans to ditch an ex and get laid go awry when they find themselves pursued not just by dyke drama, but shady criminals. Some questionable psychedelic interstitial scenes aside, this 80-minute romp is fun, fast-paced and characterful, with crackling chemistry between its leads and some diverting celebrity cameos. 

It’s a purposefully light B-movie, sure – but it holds significance as director Ethan Coen’s first narrative feature without brother Joel. Its freewheeling storytelling, increasingly absurd quest and oddball cast of characters place it alongside Burn After Reading and The Big Lebowski in the Coens’ filmography. After Joel’s solemn and classical The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, it’s certainly interesting to see the Coens’ separate proclivities when working solo – their individual filmmaking personalities could even be projected onto Qualley’s good-time gal Jamie and Viswanathan’s serious-minded bookworm Marian.

But it’s the input of co-writer Tricia Cooke that gives the film its edge. Ethan Coen’s wife and the brothers’ longtime editor, Cooke has identified as both queer and a lesbian (she and Coen call their marriage ‘non-traditional’) and it’s easy to see how this informs the film’s insight into lesbian life. There are sexual entanglements between friends, the aftermath of U-Hauling, and a lot (a lot) of dildos. Sometimes Jamie and Marian’s exploits cross into fantasy, like when they’re invited to a make-out party with an entire girls’ soccer team – a surprisingly pivotal sequence that propels the film’s vibe of heightened reality. Cooke’s background as an editor also plays into this, with expressive, cartoon-like cuts between scenes.

The fantasy elements of the storytelling work because the film is otherwise so grounded in authentic lesbian culture, giving the comic-book reverie something to pop against. The design elements are a large part of this, with production designer Yong Ok Lee (The Farewell, Minari) creating a believably lived-in world for Jamie and Marian to populate. The film is set in 1999 – just a few years before Cooke and Coen began writing the original script – but its lesbian bars are still recognisable today: slightly run-down joints with strings of multi-coloured lights, booths packed with butches, ESG and Le Tigre on the jukebox – and at least one in every stop along the way, a dream! 

The costuming is also on point, especially Qualley’s series of cut-off shirts and biker boots. When our heroes end up at a fancy hotel on one of their last stops, she puts on a plain black button-down for dinner – believable as the only smart-adjacent item of clothing she owns. My main quibble with the film is Qualley’s shaved armpits: a distractingly incongruous missed detail for a film otherwise so immersed in dyke aesthetics. 

As per the fate of any film daring to depict queer sex of any kind, much has already been noted about its many and varied sex scenes. But what is most refreshing is not how explicit the film is, but how it exploits the comedic potential of sex – whether in Marian’s subtle awkwardness towards it (and the eventual punchline after she does get some) or in Qualley’s over-the-top performance with what I will refer to as ‘Chekhov’s dildo’. 

It feels telling that, in an interview for Little White Lies, Coen states that Cooke is ‘in every way except name the co-director of the movie’. In its queer, fast-moving, comic-caper whirlwind, Drive-Away Dolls feels like a true marriage of the couples’ aesthetics and expertise – unsurprisingly for two people used to close familial collaboration. Enticingly, the pair reveal in the same interview that they’re working on scripts for a series of B-movies, with a detective noir also starring Qualley up next. With this, Bottoms and Love Lies Bleeding, are we on the cusp of a golden age of wide release lesbian genre pictures? Like the dream of Drive-Away Dolls’ lesbian bars, maybe soon they won’t be so few and far between.

Claire Biddles
Film, music and arts writer 
12 March 2024

During World War One Howard Hawks served as Second Lieutenant in the Signal Corps, the branch of the military responsible for communications. An incredibly dangerous job, it’s said by some, including Hawks himself, that the pilots of this division would refer to themselves as belonging to ‘The Suicide Club’. The perceived foolhardiness of those pilots who tasked themselves with the job of delivering mail in unforgiving conditions would be alluded to in the title, and form the basis of his story, Only Angels Have Wings. Hawks’ experiences during the war, his love for aviation, and the uncompromising attitude he had towards mortality and weakness run through this film. The picture is a window into the director’s relationship with his world.

Set on the isolated port town of Barranca, Cary Grant’s Geoff Carter is tasked with managing the postal service, along with his men, delivering the mail to neighbouring South American destinations; having to risk his life and the lives of his pilots in order to keep the service running. An assortment of supporting characters give life to the town, with Jean Arthur’s Bonnie Lee, an outsider, serving as our way into the philosophically grey world of the men of Barranca, who dissociate when one of their own dies flying in unforgiving conditions. 

When asked by Peter Bogdanovich in a 1972 interview about Only Angels Have Wings if he agreed with the philosophy of Geoff, Howard Hawks replied, “oh sure, he took the job and he wasn’t good enough. What would you do, go around moping cos you sent a guy out to be killed?”. Within the context of the film, Bonnie challenges Geoff about this perceived cruelness, and by extension challenges Hawks himself. Through the course of the narrative, we arrive at somewhere between respect and understanding for these men and the tales they must tell themselves to cope. 

“I always thought it was the luck of things… It never frightened me about flying”. Hawks’ perspective is echoed by those pilots at Barranca Airways, referencing another central theme of the story, masculinity. The men in the picture have formed a brotherhood, they love each other, but develop coping mechanisms to detach themselves if and when disaster strikes. No doubt Hawks’ experience in the war influenced this approach to his fellow man.  

The film is imbued with his experience and made richer for the specificity and detail afforded to the inner workings of a pilot’s life; the attitudes towards mortality, the comradeship shared between men, even down to the plot points themselves. Indeed, many of the more dramatic moments that make up the film’s story are lifted directly from Hawks’ life – with him having seen both a man told he had broken his neck, and a bird flying through the cockpit of a plane. 

The film is elevated by specificities in its design, even if we as the audience lack the professional acumen to verify them: at 15,000ft oxygen is required from rubber tubes, Cary Grant’s WW1 jacket, which implies the military background Hawks himself had, and the look on the pilots faces as they sense the feel of a plane that has reached its ceiling and is doomed to stall. Even the models of the aircrafts themselves were historically accurate, enhancing the drama for audiences at the time who were granted the chance to see the Ford Trimotor plane spinning into a nosedive before their eyes. 

It’s the attention to detail and personal perspective of the film that combine to create its perfectly pitched atmosphere, the depth of romance between characters, and the adventurous spirit at the heart of its story; truly one of Hawks’ finest pictures. 

David Anderson
Marketing Coordinator, Glasgow Film Festival

Relive the GFF24 opening gala, where we welcomed friends old and new to the UK Premiere of Rose Glass' new feature, Love Lies Bleeding.

Spoiler warning: these notes are best read after viewing the film. They contain discussion of plot and character details.

It’s difficult to not think about your own routines after seeing Perfect Days. Watching the modest movements of Tokyo toilet cleaner Hirayama, from his painless rise from bed, through the many thorough wipes of disinfectant on toilet bowls, to the minutes spent reading by lamplight until his eyes are too sleepy to continue, there’s a sense of rehearsed ease to this man’s life that shares DNA with all our daily movements.

Director Wim Wenders, a pioneer of the German New Wave, has always been interested in the mundanities of routine, no matter if it’s for a Patricia Highsmith thriller or a portrait of Germany’s celestial angels. But his fascination with the regular has never felt as concentrated as it does here; so dedicated is he to unearthing the gentle pleasures of a Japanese sanitation job that you’ll find yourself mentally returning to Hirayama’s work, his commute, his treasured cassette tapes, and his happily ordered life whenever the next time you do chores, run an errand, or perform your own domestic rituals.

Routines have a comforting, rhythmic texture to them, and Wenders has crafted a film that feels both unpretentious in its goals and finds something spiritual about the everyday. If we see our protagonist Hirayama in a monastic light, the subtleties of his life take on new meaning — this is not about comfort, but about achieving fulfilment with the cards we have been dealt. We are invited into this man’s bliss when he wakes up, drives to work, cleans toilets, washes, eats, reads… because we feel a similar human urge to simplify our lives to a level where we have minimised everything we don’t want to do. It’s very healing to live your life within parameters you control. It’s not just pleasure that Hirayama’s routine brings him, it’s peace.

Over two brief hours, we observe a cycle in Hirayama’s world, brought to life by a twinkly-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired Kôji Yakusho. Yakusho has enjoyed a hugely varied career, capturing existential chills with director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Séance) and seeing mainstream domestic success with hits like Shall We Dance? and Tampopo. Watch for Hirayama’s private smiles, the nods and gestures he makes in lieu of words, how selective he is with what he says — the careful, meaningful choices Yakusho makes add up to a performance worthy of the Best Actor prize he received in Cannes.

When his estranged sister asks him if he will consider visiting his sick father, and (sniffily) if he’s really cleaning toilets for a living, the contrasting ways that Yakusho reacts — restless when emotionally probed, defiant when asked to be vulnerable, proud of his hand-sculpted life — are miniature, wordless masterstrokes from an esteemed talent.

Certainly, Wenders’ drama lacks the dizzying grit of harder social realist films; Hirayama’s sanitation work is a bit (ahem) sanitised, and critics have been quick to point out we never actually see a dirty toilet. This is explained by the fact that the film originated from the Tokyo Toilet Project, a Shibuya-wide renovation of 17 public toilets from over a dozen creatives that sought to express Japan’s internationally-recognised culture of hospitality — not the type of inspiration that Wenders wanted to muck up.

Once COVID measures relaxed in Japan, Wenders was invited to look at the facilities, hopefully so he’d photograph them or come up with a short film about the renovations. It sounds strange to say that from these toilets, Hirayama was born, but it’s a minor miracle that such an earnest and affecting character was spawned by Wenders’ visit — a man not defined by his job cleaning toilets, but who champions the type of inner life you’re unlikely to expect from his story.

If it were helmed by a less sophisticated filmmaker, it would be easy for Perfect Days to come across as patronising towards Hirayama. Romanticising the lives of working-class people and painting their modest lifestyles as poetic risks condescending towards those who are forced to struggle within systems that take their time hostage and curtail their income. A great number of sanitation jobs are awful, with physical demands for not enough pay, and someone who works them is not more noble because they do not aspire to rise above them to a more comfortable salary; Hirayama is not a venerable character because he warmly accepts a modest way of life.

But while Wenders clearly admires and respects his protagonist, it's not because of his acceptance of menial employment. Rather, Wenders is fascinated by a man who has managed to navigate the demands of modern urban living while remaining soulfully intact — in fact, by nurturing his own self more than anyone else around him. Hirayama’s class status is of little interest to Wenders and Japanese co-writer Takuma Takasaki — drama does not come from the character’s struggle to survive, but the quietly enforced isolation that Hirayama’s routine depends on.

We get a better sense of why Hirayama holds onto his modest routine when other people do the great disservice of interrupting it. His talkative junior colleague needs to use his van and then pushes him to sell his library of cassette tapes — a grievous interruption. His niece, who has temporarily run away from home, asks to accompany him for a shift at work — a reluctant inconvenience. He’s abandoned on a shift and has double the workload — a slight that will cost him valuable relaxing time at home.

But most affecting is the emotional cost to Hirayama’s independence. In each of Perfect Days’ chapters, he brushes up with the exhilaration and vulnerability that comes with connecting with people, where he considers if he’s truly nurturing himself by staying away from the messiness of other people. Here, Hirayama’s careful selection of classic tunes encased in scratched cassette tapes shoulder the emotional burdens he can’t bear; there’s something so poignant about letting the greatest singers of all time speak our pain for us. But still, Hirayama is not so perfect that he can’t cry to Nina Simone.

Rory Doherty, Film journalist and critic
22 February 2024

Spoiler warning: these notes are best read after viewing the film. They contain discussion of plot and character details.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things is an adaptation of the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, itself a postmodern revision of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein (1818) and a satire of the classic Victorian novel. Lanthimos’ richly cinematic worldbuilding brings the novel’s core themes to life, exploring social and structural constraints on women, the impacts of colonialism and wealth disparity, and the value of experiencing all that life has to offer, good and bad.

Alasdair Gray was a writer and visual artist born in Glasgow, where he lived for most of his life. A leading figure in Postmodern and Scottish literature, he wrote nine novels and many plays, short stories, poems, political texts, and histories of English and Scottish literature. He was a proud Scotsman, a socialist, and a civic nationalist, famous for his epigram, ‘work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’. Everyday Glaswegians were the heroes of much of his work, and almost all his fictional writing was set in Glasgow or Scotland. Lanthimos’ film adaptation, however, is not.

Understandably, some fans are disappointed by the change. Poor Things has become a romantic symbol of the city, thanks to its fantastical descriptions of local landmarks. It provides a meaningful poetry of place, as if to fill a void described by Gray in his first novel, Lanark (1981):

‘“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”
“Because nobody imagines living here…if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”’[1]

Yet, we have not only lost out on a romantic portrayal of the city. We have also missed a chance to represent Scotland’s colonial history — a darker part of our past that is seldom acknowledged.

However, we should be used to granting creative license to filmmakers. Lanthimos has explained that 'the Scottish issue feels like a different part of the book… I felt it would just be like trying to make two different films'[2]. It is true that the development of relationships between McCandless (Ramy Youssef), Baxter (Willem Dafoe), and Bella (Emma Stone) have been condensed to focus on Bella’s voyage and intellectual awakening. Disappointment fades quickly once we are submerged in Lanthimos’ vision of Gray’s vivid imagery, and Gray’s culture is inseparable from his work. Scotland can be felt in Baxter’s cavernous townhouse and the surrounding skyline, speckled with spires. Even more so, it can be felt in Willem Dafoe’s portrayal of Baxter, which took some inspiration from videos of Alasdair Gray.[3]

Visually, the film is maximalist: Gray’s vivid gothic horror realised with modern technology. Working in a studio for the first time, Lanthimos tasked production designers with creating tactile, ‘unreal’ settings, to create a world that would 'reflect… Bella’s individuality and uniqueness'.[4] A cart is led by a prop stick-horse and skylines are painted still. Fish-eye lenses, mixed depths-of-field, and unconventional rhythms of motion enhance this otherworldly atmosphere. Lanthimos’ long-time collaborator, Sound Designer Johnnie Burn, matched this tone of artificiality by using real-world sounds from subtly mismatched sources, such as the heartbeat that represents the sound of the ship.[5]

Lanthimos is clearly devoted to Gray’s concepts. He explores one question above all: how would the world respond to a woman who does not yield to social constructs? Male characters are charmed by Bella’s thirst for life, instinctive desires, ‘refreshing independence’, and naivete, which is often mistaken for impressionability. The film derives a lot of humour from their surprise as they face the realities of life with a woman who cannot be controlled with shame. Meanwhile, Emma Stone portrays Bella’s curiosity, frustrations, and logical self-determination with a brilliant physical performance.

Screenwriter Tony McNamara and Lanthimos made an early decision to tell the story from Bella’s point of view, augmenting Gray’s vivid character descriptions by portraying them as seen through Bella’s eyes. An explosion of colour mirrors Bella’s temperament as she explores the world. Duncan Wedderburn’s (Mark Ruffalo) costumes were designed to reflect the pomp of cartoons of 19th Century, ruling-class British men — with a corset and thong as a bonus. Bella’s body is celebrated without corsets, with 'pubic hair peeking out of low-cut frilled pants'[6]. Her costumes reflect her rapid maturing and empowerment. Her wardrobe consists entirely of period pieces worn in unusual ways, assembled by her and 'always on her terms'.[7] The script also boosted Bella’s social interaction with other women, substituting Dr. Hooker with Martha von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla) and emphasising the role of Toinette (Suzy Bemba) as a stimulus for Bella’s intellectual growth.

Lanthimos has gravitated towards exploring patriarchal constraints in the past. His third feature, Dogtooth (2009), centres around a father and mother who keep their children locked indoors, ignorant to the world outside. It leans into discomfort, using sexual taboos, abuse, and theriocide to explore nuances of manipulation and patriarchal control. While Poor Things’ Godwin Baxter is a loving figure, there are parallels in his creation and control of a sealed environment for Bella and his wish that she and McCandless should live in his home forever. He is, after all, a reimagination of the Dr Frankenstein character, originally inspired by Mary Shelley’s controlling father.

Dogtooth is considered a defining film of the Greek Weird Wave, a classification of films marked by the Greek financial crisis of 2007-8. Like other films of the genre, it seeks out the awkward, depressing, and ridiculous aspects of being human. Its cinematography is beautiful, but strict in its movement, cool in tone, and detached, as if observing another species. Yet, there are parallels to Poor Things in its surrealism and absurdist, deadpan humour. Audiences may notice similarity in the editing by Yorgos Mavropsaridis, who has worked on all of Lanthimos’ films.

Rather than a seismic shift in style, it is fairer to see Poor Things as the latest in a slow evolution across many films, most like The Favourite (2018) which shares the same Director of Photography, Robbie Ryan. Poor Things represents a powerful, appropriate use of studio tools to create a mesmerising new work of science fiction, dusted with the director’s signatures: high-contrast angles, laugh-out-loud black humour, and a dance sequence. With increasing budgets and experience, Lanthimos has given his team a great deal of freedom, acting as the conductor to a major feat of collaborative creativity.

While Poor Things continues to screen in cinemas, Lanthimos’ next film is already in post-production: Kinds of Kindness marks another collaboration with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley.

Sandra Kinahan, Freelance Journalist
18 January, 2022

FOOTNOTES

[1] Gray, Alasdair, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classics, 31 May 2007) 

[2] Lanthimos, Yorgos, quoted by Robertson, Adam, “Poor Things director addresses debate around Glasgow's removal from film”, The National, 15 January, 2024 (accessed via INKL,16 January, 2024) https://www.inkl.com/news/poor-things-director-addresses-debate-around-glasgow-s-removal-from-film 

[3] Dafoe, Willem, quoted by Pond, Steve, “Willem Dafoe Is Adamant About His ‘Poor Things’ Character: Don’t Call Him a Mad Scientist!” The Wrap, 12 December 2023, (accessed 15 January 2024) https://www.thewrap.com/poor-things-doctor-baxter-willem-dafoe-interview/

[4] Lanthimos, Yorgos, interviewed in “Poor Things' Director & Actor/Producer Yorgos Lanthimos & Emma Stone”, IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast 14 December 2023, (accessed 15 January 2024). https://podcasts.apple.com/ro/podcast/poor-things-director-actor-produceryorgos-lanthimos/id1142632832?i=1000638573093 

[5] As previous 

[6] Waddington, Holly interviewed by Gladstone, Violet in, ‘”She Doesn’t Follow Rules”: The Story Behind Emma Stone’s Poor Things Looks”, AnOther Magazine, 15 January, 2024 (accessed 15 January 2024). https://www.anothermag.com/fashion-beauty/15353/poorthings-costume-design-interview-holly-waddington-emma-stone
 
[7] As previous

It's here, the full GFF24 programme!

 The 20th edition of Scotland’s largest film festival will run from 28 February to 10 March at Glasgow Film Theatre (itself celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024) plus venues across the city.

Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) 2024 will open with the UK premiere of Rose Glass’s new thriller Love Lies Bleeding starring Kristen Stewart, and close with the world premiere of Janey, following Scottish stand-up legend Janey Godley as she embarks on her final live tour following her cancer diagnosis.

Across 12 packed days, the programme boasts 11 world and international premieres, 69 UK premieres and 15 Scottish premieres, from 44 countries.

World and international premieres include Tummy Monster, a hallucinogenic dark drama by Glasgow director Ciaran Lyons, starring rising Scottish star Lorn Macdonald; the big screen adaptation of blackly comic novel Bucky F*cking Dent, written by, directed by and starring David Duchovny, and a new restoration of Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet, the rarely-seen documentary shot during his 1975 tour of Ireland.

UK premieres include real-life father and daughter duo Ewan and Clara McGregor taking a road trip in Bleeding Love, Cynthia Erivo as a Liberian refugee who befriends Alia Shawkat’s American tour guide in Drift, and Viggo Mortensen directing and starring in Western epic The Dead Don’t Hurt.

Scottish audiences will get the first chance to see Kevin Macdonald’s take on the rise and fall of a fashion icon in High and Low: John Galliano, Lea Seydoux and George MacKay in The Beast and Luna Carmoon’s hotly-tipped debut Hoard.

The UK premiere of the fantastical romance La Chimera starring Josh O’Connor will take place at both GFF and nine partner cinemas across the UK.

Glasgow Film Festival returns for our 20th edition. Join us from 28 February - 10 March 2024 for premieres, Q&As, specials events, and more. Until then, take a look at our video to find out who we are and what we do.

Submissions are now open for the 20th anniversary of the Glasgow Film Festival, which runs from 28 February - 10 March 2024.

If you're are a filmmaker, we want to hear from you! We are looking for features from Scotland, the UK, and around the world.

Glasgow is one of the friendliest film festivals on the planet with a wide-ranging programme that celebrates every corner of world cinema and provides a fantastic showcase for the best of Scottish film. Perfectly placed in March for spring and summer releases, GFF has launched some of the best new films to the UK's film press and cinema market.

You can submit your film through FilmFreeway, and see our FAQs for further details.

Submission Timeline
w/c 17 July - Submissions Open
25 August - Earlybird Deadline
15 September - Regular Deadline
6 October - Late Deadline
27 October - Extended Deadline

Matt Johnson (The Dirties, Nirvanna the Band the Show) sat down with us at GFF23 to talk about his life and career, as well as his new film BLACKBERRY.

Blackberry is the stranger than fiction re-telling of the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of Blackberry phones. Research In Motion founders, Douglas Fregin (Johnson) and Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) are struggling to make headway on what they believe is the next step in smart technology. When a chance meeting with Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) leads to the company propelling into profit, the need to stay ahead of competitors causes cracks to appear and the usually tight knit pair are pushed to breaking point by Balsillie’s nefarious business tactics.

We were delighted to host the UK Premiere of Carol Morley's TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING at #GFF23, and had a great chat with some of the guests on the red carpet such as director Carol Morley.

Amid China’s introduction of a new national security law that restricts certain words, images, books, slogans and songs, director San San F Young examines the internal struggle of those who choose to fight to protect the creative freedoms of the residents of Hong Kong. San San F Young joined us on the GFF23 red carpet to discuss her film; HONG KONG MIX-TAPE at GFF23. Seek this film out - it went down a storm.

Young Selectors, a panel of 18–25 year-olds with a passion for film, returned for Glasgow Film Festival 2023 in full force. Eight young people, all based in Glasgow, selected films from the festival programme to spotlight with introductions, discussions, reviews and online content. Our Young Selectors talk about their picks for GFF23 here, and their choices were stellar!

See more from these great young folk on glasgowfilm.org and our Youtube.

Fast-paced, funny and brimming with eye-popping Crouching Tiger-like fights, Polite Society is played to the hilt by a fantastic cast. Priya Kansara is a force of nature as Ria but may just have met her match in Nimra Bucha’s formidable matriarch, a woman who will let nothing stand in the way of her son’s nuptials. We were joined on the GFF23 red carpet by writer/ director Nida Manzoor, star Priya Kansara, producer Olivier Kaempfer, and exec producer John Pocock.

Two 20-something Londoners embrace their impulsive side and embark on a day of joyous mayhem in director Raine Allen Miller’s debut feature that is a vibrant and playful rom-com for the new generation. Director Raine Allen-Miller and cast member Vivian Oparah joined us on the GFF23 red carpet with producer Yvonne Isememe Ibazebo.

Our lovely Audience Award sponsors, Belhaven Brewery, invited us to go along for a tour of the oldest working brewery in Scotland. We were joined by The Post Performance Blues Band and Blackberry director, Matt Johnson :)

Now that GFF23 is over - lets relive it in the virtual realm! All this week we're sharing the great videos by Richie Morgan from the GFF red carpet, giving you the inside look on the fest. Check out our Youtube channel for much much more!

Here we have the fantastic Opening Gala of Adura Onashile's Glasgow-shot GIRL, which was the perfect start to a perfect fest.

Emily Watson and screenwriter Shane Crowley were fantastic GFF23 guests and it was great to have them present and talk about GOD'S CREATURES.

Check out the whole discussion and get your tickets for more GFF23 events happening this week! - glasgowfilm.org/festival

We're so thrilled that the legendary Lee Grant(!) sent us this video to introduce the series of 5 documentaries of hers we're showing at GFF23.

She says it all better than I can, so listen to a titan and get excited to see these fantastic and underseen documentaries. Groundbreaking work from an unstoppable talent.

See the films on the big screen in Glasgow - bit.ly/GFF23_LeeGrant

There's only award that Glasgow Film Festival gives out and it is decided by the people that matter most, YOU, our wonderful audience!

Ten handpicked films from first or second-time directors who we believe to be some of the most exciting filmmakers around. All of the ten films showcase a director whose work deserves the love and attention of a wider audience. All you have to do is watch, then vote for your favourite.

Find out more about the films and when you can see them: bit.ly/GFF_AudienceAward23

The Glasgow Film Festival 2023 programme is here, and you can experience it in video form here and in Letterboxd list form here - letterboxd.com/gff/list/glasgow-film-festival-2023-programme/

We've got a sweet PDF schedule here - bit.ly/GFF23_Calendar

Get your tickets on January 30 and check out the Programme Announcement here - bit.ly/GFF23_FullProgramme

So many links but we swear they're great.

The end of the year is always list central, and 2022 was a bigger list year than most. With the arrival of Sight and Sound's latest 'Greatest Films of All Time Poll' we see the shifts in the canon, and it has of course sparked lots of debate around Bests, Greatests, Favourites, and more. 

So... we decided to ask people working for Glasgow Film and Glasgow Film Festival, what are your favourite films?

letterboxd.com/gff/list/glasgow-films-favourite-films/