Glasgow Film Festival announces 2022 programme
GFF returns with a programme packed with exciting new releases, combining UK premieres of some of the most hotly anticipated films from last year’s summer festival circuit to the best in new Scottish talent. Plus, an interview with the festival’s co-director and Glasgow Film CEO, Allison Gardner.
Don’t mention COVID. Don’t mention COVID. Don’t mention COVID.
After COVID forced last year’s event to take place entirely online – with audiences accessing films virtually via a streaming platform – the 18th edition of the Glasgow Film Festival returns to the familiar-yet-fabled format that we took for granted for so long; actually going to things in person, with other people!
Taking place between 2nd and 13th March, the festival is bookended by two UK premieres. The opening gala will host a screening of The Outfit, which stars Academy Award winner Mark Rylance as a Saville Row tailor who relocates to Chicago and becomes wrapped up with a group of mobsters. The festival closes with the premiere of Murina, a simmering drama set against the backdrop of a seaside summer in Croatia, directed by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović and exec-produced by Martin Scorsese.
The festival also welcomes films that have received considerable acclaim during last year’s summer festival circuit. Having received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in September, Audrey Diwan’s Happening will receive its UK premiere at a special International Woman’s Day gala screening on the 8th of March, while UK audiences will have their first chance to witness Renate Reinsve’s glowing performance in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (originally titled Verdens Verste Menneske), which earned her the Best Actress award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Having been fortunate enough to see the film at Cannes last year, I can confirm it is worth making time to see. In total, the festival will host 10 World premieres, 4 European premieres, 65 UK premieres, and 13 Scottish premieres across 12 days in March.
Mark Rylance in The Outfit, this year’s opening premiere; Leon Lucev and Gracie Filipovic in Murina, which will close GFF22.
As always, this year’s festival programme shines a light on homegrown Scottish talent. Direct from Sundance, the festival will host the European premiere of My Old School, starring Alan Cumming. This docudrama uncovers the real-life story of a Bearsden Academy high-school pupil, Brandon Lee, who was discovered to actually be a 30-something former pupil who returned to his old school under a new identity to retake his exams after failing medical school. Director Jono MacLeod, who went to school with Lee in the 1990s, uses interviews and archive footage to retrace the steps of the boy he knew as Brandon. The festival will also host an exclusive live conversation with Glasgow-born Armando Iannucci, the genius behind the BBC’s political satire The Thick of It and HBO’s Veep, co-creator of Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge character, and director of films In the Loop and The Death of Stalin.
A particularly interesting inclusion is Angry Young Men, from first-time director Paul Morris. In development since 2016 and filmed in Hamilton over a period of 3 years, the film was produced on a ‘micro-budget’ (the concept of a budget may itself be a grandiose exaggeration of how this personal project was financed), contained a cast of volunteer amateur actors, with virtually every aspect of filming and post-production being handled solely by Morris; probably the purest example of grassroots filmmaking you will find at any professional film festival this year. It’s great to see this release sit alongside recipients of coveted awards from some of the most prestigious global film festivals, or films that boast casts containing Academy Award winners.
This year’s festival is stacked with documentaries covering a wide range of subjects. From Stefan Forbes’ Hold Your Fire, the story of a botched robbery, hostages, and a murdered policeman in 1970s New York, to a-ha: The Movie, which (you guessed it) charts the rise of Norway’s first pop superstars; from Wake Up Punk, a film from Joe Corré – son of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood – which questions whether punk and counterculture’s sensibilities and motifs have been commodified, to Scottish director Martyn Robertson’s Ride The Wave, which follows the journey of 14-year-old surfer Ben Larg as he prepares to take on one of the biggest and coldest waves on Earth.
Alongside the festival’s main programme, the GFF has previously announced several additional strands that showcase films from world cinema. The African Stories collection will feature nine contemporary films celebrating the people, history and culture in some of the 54 countries in Africa, including Casablanca Beats – another old friend from Cannes – and Khadar Ayderus Ahmed’s multi award-winning Djibouti-set The Gravedigger’s Wife, which is a touching portrait of a man trying to raise money for his wife’s life-saving surgery. Another strand is devoted to Edith Carlmar, Norway’s first female director and a pioneer in Nordic neo-noir cinema. The festival will host screenings of four of her films, including debut Death is a Caress. Also returning to the festival is the popular retrospective series, offered in the form of free screenings that take place each morning during the festival’s run. This year’s theme is Winds of Change: Cinema in ’62, and will see classics such as Dr. No, The Manchurian Candidate, and To Kill a Mockingbird return to the big screen at the Glasgow Film Theatre.
Details on the full GFF22 programme is available on GlasgowFilm.org.
Tickets for the opening and closing galas go on sale Monday January 31st. Tickets for the rest of the programme go live on Wednesday 2nd February. All tickets are available at the GFT box office and GlasgowFilm.org/festival.
Interview with Glasgow Film CEO, Allison Gardner
Allison Gardner joined Glasgow Film in 1993 as duty manager of the cinemas. She started the Glasgow Film Festival in 2005 and has been co-director of the festival since 2007, alongside Allan Hunter. In April 2020, she was appointed CEO of Glasgow Film.
Given that last year’s edition of the festival was held entirely online, how does it feel to be welcoming audiences back to GFT, in-person, for this year’s festival?
So Good!
You know yourself; Cinema is the preferred option to watch films. Whilst we were delighted to pivot to online last year and had great support from audiences, it’s really nice to welcome people back into the physical space.
Cinema is a very safe environment and we’re following all government guidance. Obviously, it’s a personal choice to come and we realise that not everyone will want to, which is why we are offering a limited number of films online to our audience to allow them to participate too.
You are the co-director of the festival (with Allan Hunter). What’s the dynamic like when it comes to curating the festival each year, do you each have specific areas of expertise, or is it a collaborative effort throughout?
It’s much more of an organic situation than you might imagine! Allan writes for Screen International as well, so he sees a lot of films in that capacity. In pre-pandemic times, we would go to Cannes or Toronto film festivals to see films. Whilst we were still able to attend those online last year, it has been a very different experience. The rosé wine that I serve myself at the end of a day virtually attending Cannes is not the same as drinking it in the South of France!
The entire festival programming team watch as many films as possible and try to select films that audiences will love; films that audiences will be interested in. We try to explore releases from as many countries as possible. You look at African Stories (this year’s strand showcasing 9 films from continental African cinema), which gave us the chance to select lots of great films under a particular sub-strand for the programme. We always find that there are great films out there and we build the programme based on that.
The uncertainty caused by the ongoing pandemic meant we decided to condense the programme somewhat. We have less films than we did at our last in-person festival (in 2020) because we don’t have the pop-up venues that we had the luxury of organising pre-pandemic.
As a non-profit, educational charity, we need to ensure that we spend our money very wisely during this time of uncertainty. This allowed us to pay 100% of our staffs wages throughout the entire pandemic, which is very important to me.
The programme sees films with serious pedigree – films with an Academy Award winning cast & crew or big buzz festival films – sit side by side with the work of first time filmmakers, notably the ‘micro-budget’ Angry Young Men. How important is it to give a platform to films like Angry Young Men, which you could say is the purest example of grassroots filmmaking?
It’s really important and it’s key to support local talent. The film shows a lot of promise and we’re delighted to be supporting Angry Young Men. I think we need to do a lot more to encourage those types of films to be made. Whilst it’s great that we’ve got things like The Batman and Indian Jones 5 being made in Scotland, it’s really important that we have these other films coming through and that we give a platform to a variety of different voices.
We showed (Scottish director) John McPhail’s first feature at the Glasgow Film Festival and someone from Blazing Griffin (BAFTA-award winning film production company) was in the audience; this sparked a creative relationship and they went on to make Anna and the Apocalypse together. Those are the kinds of opportunities we hope to generate and that’s why we’re giving a platform to local talent.
I think Screen Scotland are doing a great job to try and change the dynamic and remove the barriers to entering the film industry, and that extends to encouraging more female directors, more people of colour, people from working class backgrounds, and people with disabilities. We need to allow their stories to be told too.
Gardner with some of the cast from Paul Morris’ Angry Young Men, which will have its world premiere at GFF22.
This year’s retrospective programme is a selection of films from 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and race riots on both sides of the Atlantic, and some of the films touch on the themes of political paranoia and racial injustice. It’s apparent – and depressing – that some of these themes are still issues that we face in 2022. Were the parallels that can be drawn between 1962 and 2022 part of the inspiration behind choosing this particular year for the retrospective screenings?
We want to filter these films through today’s lens. Film history is important and we can’t cancel it. Something made in 1962 might look different when viewed out of context in 2022, and what we want to do is contextualise these films and explore the attitudes towards colonialism (from Lawrence of Arabia), disability (from The Miracle Worker), political paranoia (from The Manchurian Candidate), and racism (from To Kill a Mockingbird) that these films were trying to tackle in 1962. This period was very different to the world in 2022 and we want to pose the question of whether these films were successful in doing that, given the hindsight that we have today. You might say that these films contain language or representation that we are uncomfortable with today, but it’s key to contextualise this and encourage audiences to talk about why they are great films, or perhaps why they didn’t achieve what they intended to because they were made in this period.
It’s important that we encourage younger audiences to look back on these films; we can’t just cancel reams of cinematic history, you must be able to show things, prompt discussion, contextualise, and think about when and why they were made. This means we can understand what may be wrong with them in the context of today’s world. That’s why it’s really important to us that these films are free and accessible to everyone.
Finally, which one film are you personally most looking forward to presenting to audiences at this year’s festival?
Gosh, there are so many great ones. I think Hive (a drama dealing with the fallout from the Kosovan war from a female perspective) is a great film, Happening is absolutely fantastic. Our closing gala film, Murina, is beautiful.
What I would say is: take a chance and see something that is outside your comfort zone!
Glasgow Film Festival 2022 takes place from 2nd-13th March.