A FILM festival begins next month with a request to keep your mobile phone on throughout its opening screening.
My First Film is a “radical, interactive, live expanded cinema performance” which begins with filmmaker Zia Anger asking the audience not to shut off their devices.
The US artist, known best for music videos for the likes of Jenny Hval and Angel Olsen, will then narrate and annotate the film via music and live typing – including sending fragments of her story to viewers’ phones.
Shown in Scotland for the first time on March 18 to open this year’s Glasgow Short Film Festival (GSFF), My First Film will be followed by another live event on March 20 when Austrian artists Robin Klengel and Leonhard Müllner take their audience on a tour through the post-apocalyptic New York of Tom Clancy’s blockbuster computer game The Division.
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Operation Jane Walk Live will see two audience members accompany the artists on a journey through the digital battleground as Klengel and Mullner act as tour guides dodging gunfire and lecturing on architectural history.
The politics of place are central to this year’s festival, which is GSFF’s first as an independent charitable organisation, and the first time it’s offering sliding scale ticket pricing based on ability to pay.
Named last year as one of MovieMaker Magazine’s “top 25 coolest film festivals in the world”, the festival also includes Felix In Wonderland (March 21), Marie Losier’s collaboration with electronic musician Felix Kubin, and a three-day strand (March 20-22) presenting stories from Northern Ireland such as Pat Murphy’s pioneering feature-length 1981 debut Maeve and Mariah Garnett’s Trouble, acclaimed by Sight And Sound as one of the best documentaries of 2019.
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“In a ceaselessly contested socio-political landscape, putting together a programme exploring how the histories and realities of the spaces we live in and move through impact us felt like the right thing to do,” says GSFF co-director Sanne Jehoul.
“We hope Glasgow audiences will find a lot to respond to and engage with in the programme, from intimate accounts of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, an uncompromising examination of black communities’ relationships to landscapes, in a live tour through a dystopian replica of New York City, and in Sorayos Prapapan’s gentle critiques of a corrupt and militaristic Thai society. We’re
also proud to present some of the best new Scottish short films, as well as a fantastic selection of fresh work from around the world, with 23 countries represented in our International competition.”
March 18 to 22, venues across Glasgow, various times, pay what you can. www.glasgowshort.org
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