HIGHLIGHTS of the fourteenth Glasgow Film Festival include the world premiere of the directorial debut from Doctor Who actress Karen Gillan and a visit to her hometown by Lynne Ramsay to introduce the Scottish premiere of her new film You Were Never Really Here.
Now one of the largest film festivals in the UK with more than 330 separate events running in venues across the city for ten days from February 21 to March 4, the GFF will screen over 180 films from 51 countries including six world premieres and 77 UK premieres, including Wes Anderson’s animated adventure Isle of Dogs, which opens the festival.
Showing in Scotland for the first time will be 52 films, including Todd Haynes’ mystery drama Wonderstruck, best foreign language film Oscar contender A Fantastic Woman, the screen adaptation of League of Gentlemen creator Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s West End stage hit Ghost Stories and the final screen outing of the late and very great Harry Dean Stanton in the titular role of John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky.
Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here stars Joaquin Phoenix as a traumatised veteran who tracks down missing girls for a living.
When an unfinished version of the film screened at the Cannes Film Festival, it won Phoenix the best actor award and Ramsay the award for best screenplay.
The director is expected to attend the film’s first screening in Scotland, and she will be Edith Bowman’s guest on the DJ/presenter’s hit music and movies podcast Soundtracking, an episode of which will be recorded at the festival in front of a live audience.
Karen Gillan, known to many as Guardians of the Galaxy’s Nebula, also returns to Scotland for the red carpet gala world premiere of her directorial debut The Party’s Just Beginning, a tale of grief and survivor’s guilt filmed in Glasgow and Inverness, where she grew up.
Gillan shot to fame as Amy Pond, the companion of the Eleventh Doctor, played by Matt Smith.
It’s the Tenth Doctor, Bathgate-born David Tennant who stars in You, Me and Him, a “rom-com with a twist” which gets its first European screening at the GFF with Tennant set to be in attendance alongside director Daisy Aitkens.
Other famous faces set to appear at GFF 2018 are Gregory’s Girl star John Gordon Sinclair with the Scottish premiere of music biopic Nico 1988, actor/director Paddy Considine who will attend the Scottish premiere of his boxing drama Journeyman and Hollywood veteran Bill Pullman who visits Glasgow for the UK premiere of Jared Moshe’s western The Ballad of Lefty Brown, as well as a look back at his film career from 1987’s Spaceballs to last year’s tennis comedy drama Battle of the Sexes.
For those itching to see familiar places on the big screen, there’s the Glasgow-filmed Super November which stars comedian Josie Long and Harry Potter actor Sean Biggerstaff as doomed lovers who meet just as Western civilization is crumbling.
The world premiere of Felipe Bustos Sierra’s Scottish-made documentary Nae Pasaran closes the GFF on March 4. Telling the true story of the workers at the East Kilbride Rolls Royce factory who grounded half of Chile’s Air Force in the 1970s as an act of solidarity against Pinochet’s dictatorship, it’s likely to be a defiant end to the festival on March 4.
Other strands include a tribute to Ida Lupino, the film noir femme fatale who went on to become the only female director working in the Hollywood system, the gory FrightFest, Stranger Than Fiction’s true life tales, the weird ride that is Future Cult, and a focus on some of the best contemporary cinema coming from Ireland, including The Cured, a provocative horror set in Dublin starring Ellen Page.
Shifting attention from the finished product on the screen is Industry Focus, a mini festival of its own running from February 28 to March 2.
Now in its third year, the three-day event is open to anyone working in the industry.
The mini festival will offer talks as well as “space for an urgent addressing of the recent revelations surrounding the industry and its working practices, with a BAFTA Scotland panel looking at practical ways of redressing gender imbalance and Women in Film & Television (UK) exploring the crucial issue of sexual harassment in the UK industry.”
Interest is the only requirement to attend the free Behind the Scenes events, which includes a BAFTA Scotland masterclass with Paddington foley artist Peter Burgis and a talk by with Game of Thrones prosthetics artist Stuart Bray.
Allan Hunter, who co-directs the GFF with Allison Gardner, says: “I can’t wait for audiences to discover a wealth of delights from Karen Gillan’s directorial debut to Harry Dean Stanton’s touching swansong, our fantastic free Rebel Heroes retrospective and a stunning selection of unmissable Audience Award contenders.”
“There truly is something for everyone from the casual cinemagoer to the dedicated cinephile.”
The brochure for this year’s festival is now live at glasgowfilm.org/brochure with tickets going on general sale on Monday [January 29] at 10am via glasgowfilm.org/festival by calling the box office on 0141 332 6535 or by visiting the Glasgow Film Theatre on the city’s Rose Street.
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