Glasgow Film Festival ‘Geres’ Up For 2016 Programme

The year after the year before the 2016 film festival season is well under way and tonight the Glasgow Film Festival ‘Geres’ up for their 12th Programme. In the luxurious surroundings of Citizen M Hotel in the heart of the city 2016 film festival was officially launched and the festival does not disappoint. Glaswegians and Cinephiles will be spoiled with choice of  over 308 events including 174 films with The Coen Brothers Hail Caesar! opening the festival with UK premiere. Closing with Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa making it’s Scottish premiere ahead of it’s UK cinematic release in March.

Glasgow Film Festival will welcome a number of very special guests, including Richard Gere, who will be supporting the UK premiere of his new film Time Out Of Mind (Sun 28 Feb), in which he plays a homeless man, possibly suffering from mental illness, adrift in New York. Natalie Dormer, best known for Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games, walks the red carpet for the UK premiere of The Forest (Thu 25 Feb); director Ben Wheatley will also be in attendance for the Scottish premiere of High-Rise (Thu 18 Feb), the high-profile adaptation of JG Ballard’s dystopian novel starring Tom Hiddleston and Sienna Miller. Veteran arthouse director Peter Greenaway and über-stuntman Vic Armstrong will also be taking part in In Person events discussing their careers. Full list of confirmed guests below; further guest announcements will be made closer to the festival.

Other major UK premieres this year include Demolition, the new film from Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, Wild), starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts, Louder Than Bombs, the Cannes Palme d’Or nominee directed by Joachim Trier(confirmed guest) and starring Gabriel Byrne and Jesse Eisenberg, Sing Street, the new Dublin-set musical by Once writer/director John Carney, the brilliant, Oscar-nominated Mustang, Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s labour-of-love Miles Davis film, and the new Disney animation Zootropolis, created by the minds behind Wreck-It Ralph and Tangled. The programme of high-profile new films also includes Cannes Palme d’Or winner Dheepan, Norway’s Oscar entry, action-thriller The Wave, Miguel Gomes’ utterly majestic trilogy Arabian Nights, multi-award-winning indie James White, Truth, Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett’s tense take on the 60 Minutes George W Bush scandal, and Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s blistering follow-up to Blue Ruin, starring Sir Patrick Stewart playing against type as the leader of a neo-Nazi group. GFF is also thrilled to host the world premiere of Hamish, a documentary about Scottish poet, songwriter and intellectual Hamish Henderson.

Glasgow Film Festival is renowned for its special events and ‘total film’ experiences, where classic films are reinterpreted in unique and iconic settings, and this year’s programme brings a number of films celebrating significant anniversaries to life off the screen in some legendary Glasgow venues – in fact, it’s possible to have a different film experience in a different, iconic venue every night of the festival. While the all-action screenings of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Silence of the Lambs at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum sold out within days of being announced in December, the festival still has some aces up its sleeve, with a different and unusual experience possible every single night of the festival. Teen romantics of all ages might like to recreate the vibrant mid-nineties glamour of the Capulet masked ball from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (complete with fishtank and cocktails served in poison vials) in city-centre mansion house Trades Hall; wannabe newshounds can celebrate the fortieth anniversary of biting media satire Network in BBC Scotland’s hub at Pacific Quay, after hours. Thelma & Louise is 25 years old this year, and in celebration of those gals GFF invites you to travel to Glasgow’s own Deep South for a pre-screening line-dancing session at the Grand Ole Opry, Europe’s largest Country & Western Saloon. Or why not abandon all control and be hustled aboard the GFF prison bus, where you’ll be handed a regulation orange jumpsuit, handcuffed, and taken to a top-secret location for a very special screening of Con Air…?

The festival programme had been finalised well before the sad news of David Bowie’s death had been announced; by coincidence festival-goers have a number of chances to pay their respects to the man for whom the Sound & Vision programme strand was named. D A Pennebaker’s concert film of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (regularly named as one of the best live music films ever made) screens late night on Saturday 20 February, preceded by the documentary short Let’s Dance: Bowie Down Under, which follows the Thin White Duke in the early 1980s. GFF will also be using the Glasgow Planetarium for the first time, as you shoot out to space for a fortieth anniversary screening of The Man Who Fell To Earth (Tue 23 Feb), preceded by a guided tour through the galaxy and experimental Argentinean short film Contraluz, which was designed specially for the Planetarium’s 360° screen. A fittingly beautiful, outlandish and out-of-this-world salute to Bowie’s definitive film role as visiting alien Thomas Jerome Newton.

Allan Hunter, Glasgow Film Festival Co-Director, said:‘The 2016 Glasgow Film Festival programme is bursting with must-see movies and events. I’m excited to introduce audiences to real gems like Pablo Trapero’s gripping crime drama The Clan in our Argentine focus, Zhang Yang’s breathtaking Tibetan film Paths Of The Soul, and a cracking line-up of Audience Award contenders including the unforgettable, Oscar-nominated Mustang. Where else would you want to be in February?’

Allison Gardner, Glasgow Film Festival Co-Director, said: ‘I’m really delighted with this year’s programme. We’ve got some exceptional premieres in our Gala strand, a great and thoroughly original line up of documentaries in Stranger Than Fiction, and a really charming, child-friendly Modern Families programme headlined by the UK premiere of Disney’s Zootropolis. The festival keeps moving forward, with new developments like our Industry Focus conference, whilst also maintaining our roots as an audience-focused festival where everyone can come together to share a love of cinema. And we’ve been around for a few years now, so look out for some extra-special movie anniversaries in the programme.’

Tickets for the main festival programme are on sale from 10am on Monday 25 January. The full brochure will be available online from 19.15 on Wednesday 20 January at www.glasgowfilm.org/festival. Further guests attending will be announced nearer to the festival date.

We will be attending Glasgow Film Festival and will do our best to deliver the best coverage as possible, as ever we wish the festival the best of luck for 2016 festival!

Please note this post was created before  from official press release, we will update this post when we get more news on the line.