Glasgow Film Festival Announce New Strands For 2015 Programme

Glasgow Film Festival organisers today announced their 2015 dates, as well as a slew of new programme strands for the upcoming festival. This year the festival stretches out over a wider geographic area than in previous years, making use of even more cinemas and venues across Glasgow, while paying special tribute to the city itself.

Supported by Glasgow City Marketing Bureau, Creative Scotland, BFI and EventScotland, the festival, which in 2014 logged over 40,000 admissions, will return from 18 February to 1 March 2015 – a day longer than previous festivals. Glasgow Youth Film Festival has been rebranded as a sleeker, weekend-long festival focusing tightly on cinema for teenagers and young adults, from 6-8 February, and Glasgow Short Film Festival moves away from the others for the first time, standing by itself from 11-15 March.

Amongst the new programme strands this year are Nerdvana, bringing together the festival’s previous ‘geek-friendly’ events with a focus on cult cinema, gaming and comic book culture; Pioneer, which consolidates the festival’s growing reputation as the place to have a first encounter with the great directors of the future; and CineMasters, offering a sneak peak at new work from internationally renowned auteurs. And Glasgow Youth Film Festival’s sharpened focus on teenagers allows GFF to welcome in children (and their parents) with the Modern Families strand.

The festival runs an annual strand focusing on new cinema from a particular country, as well as a retrospective looking back over the career of a particular era or star. Following Glasgow’s passing of the Commonwealth Games baton over to the Gold Coast, our new strand Strewth! showcases the best new (and classic) Australian cinema, while Here’s Looking At You, Kid pays homage to Ingrid Bergman’s life and work.

These strands will run alongside and in conjunction with GFF’s signature pop-up cinema events, which make imaginative, unusual use of some of the city’s unique venues. However, this year the festival will take its celebration of the city a step further. Taking its name from the four-year local history project run by Glasgow Film, the Cinema City strand is about Glasgow’s love affair with the movies: screenings of classic Glasgow-set films will sit alongside an exhibition showcasing memorabilia and oral histories of cinema-going in the city.

Due to a major refurbishment at regular festival venue Cineworld on Renfrew Street, GFF will be using alternative venues across the city this year. While this will result in slightly fewer films in the programme, the festival’s extension for an extra day immediately opens up new and exciting opportunities. More of the festival will be based out of the CCA, where new DCP equipment will be installed, and screenings will also take place in the West End at the Grosvenor Cinema for the first time since 2011. Additional venues across the south and east of the city will be announced closer to the launch date.

Festival Co-Director Allison Gardner said: “We’re using this opportunity to take the festival out beyond the city centre and bring it to new audiences. We have always been an audience-focused festival, and our new strands like Pioneer and Nerdvana are the result of listening to feedback and picking up on elements of the festival our audience responds to. We’re also excited to engage with younger cinema-going audiences; so our Modern Families strand will show some really extraordinary and imaginative films about childhood. And I’m delighted that the culmination of our Cinema City project will result in a real celebration of what the movies mean to Glasgow – it’s like a little extra gift to our audiences.”

The full GFF programme will be announced on Wednesday 21 January 2015 and available to browse on www.glasgowfilm/festival from Thursday 22 January.

As ever The People’s Movies and Cinehouse will be at the festival covering every moment to best of our abilities, so stay tuned for further updates, for now below is further info about the new festival strands, dates and what we can expect….

Glasgow Short Film Festival: 11–15 March
Scotland’s leading short film festival returns, this time in March and extended to five sublime days of screenings devoted to petite and perfectly-formed movies. Alongside a wealth of exciting new talent competing for the Bill Douglas Award for International Short Film and the Scottish Short Film Award, GSFF will stage unique events and parties in venues across the city, including a celebration of Finnish underground film and music, and a guerrilla cinema walking tour screening films in some of the city’s overlooked public spaces. The full programme will be announced in January 2015, with some special events announced in December. More details at www.glasgowfilm.org/gsff

Glasgow Youth Film Festival 6­­­–8 February
GYFF has a new look this year. Now one weekend-long, the festival will focus exclusively on films which look at teenage and young adult life. As the younger child-friendly films graduate into GFF’s Modern Families strand, the youth programming team (all aged 15-19) are pulling together an issue-based programme. Industry insiders (and a few starrier teen heroes) will offer masterclasses and advice to young people who want to make a career in film or TV. GYFF are also venturing into pop-up cinema this year, with a mystery closing event at a yet-to-be disclosed location as part of Glasgow’s Green Year 2015. Full programme announced early December; more information at www.glasgowfilm.org/festival/gyff

New programme strands for 2015

Strewth! As Glasgow hands over the Commonwealth Games to the Gold Coast, we celebrate Australia’s home-grown film industry, from some old favourites to a showcase of the excellent new films coming up from Down Under. The duality between broad, empty outback and the increasingly sleek metropolis, ever-present racial tensions, particularly as they relate to land ownership, and jet-black humour that occasionally veers into a gritted-teeth sense of camp, are themes that run through the last three decades of Aussie cinema, and come together in the films in this strand. Ripper, mate.

Modern Families Packed with gorgeous films which have found new, imaginative ways of telling stories to and about children, and their families. The festival has been somewhat remiss in catering to younger audience members in the past: with family-friendly screenings throughout festival weekends we’re hoping to make up for that. This strand will offer a range of perspectives on the tricky business of growing up, in animation and live action: you don’t have to bring a child with you to enjoy them, either!

Nerdvana Hey, remember when Judge Dredd creator John Wagner came to GFF? When Joss Whedon charmed three cinemas’ full of loved-up fans and the gigantic signing queue outside? When comic book legend Mark Millar took on gamer icon Robert Florence in a battle of the fans, or that time the red carpet was packed with Game of Thrones cos-players out to meet the Hound? Yeah, Glasgow Film Festival’s geeky streak is at least a mile wide. Nerdvana is a new programme consolidating all of our alt-culture interests, from gaming to comics to cult film, in one handy strand.

Cinema City The culmination of our four-year Cinema City project, this strand celebrates Glasgow’s enduring relationship with the flicks. In the 1930s, the ‘cinema city’ had more cinemas per head of population than any other in the world; and now it regularly acts as a backdrop for Hollywood blockbusters. Films and events will look at both the history of cinema-going within the city and notable Glasgow-set films. The centerpiece of this strand is our Cinema City exhibition, to be held at the Mitchell Library, comprising of memorabilia, archive footage, and oral testimony from film lovers across the city, aged from 19-92, about their memories of the movies.

Pioneer GFF has been steadily gaining a reputation as the place to catch the best filmmakers of tomorrow. We’ve screened early work by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the 2014 Cannes’ Palme D’or winner for Winter Sleep, Ben Wheatley, Lena Dunham, Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), and Palme D’or nominees Zhangke Jia, Xavier Dolan and Asghar Faradi, to name but a few. Pioneer celebrates emerging filmmakers – directors and writers on their debut or second feature who we think might go on to do even greater things.

CineMasters Previews and premieres of new works from the biggest names in international cinema.

Here’s Looking At You, Kid On the centenary of her birth, GFF’s retrospective strand celebrates the luminous Ingrid Bergman, tracing her career through ten of her best films. Bergman is now most famous for Casablanca (1942), but she carved a singular figure throughout sexist, code-neutered Hollywood, tending to play serious, intelligent roles: career women (psychologists, Mother Superiors), political figures (revolutionaries, spies); women of honour and decency like Joan of Arc or Casablanca’s Ilsa Lund. This strand follows her from her early days in Sweden, through three Oscar wins, to the last cinema film she made before her death in 1982.