Glasgow Film Festival 2016 programme announced
The lineup for Glasgow Film Festival 2016 has been unveiled – we look forward to new films from Ben Wheatley and Miguel Gomes, a guest appearance from Richard Gere, and the chance to recreating scenes from Con Air in one of GFF's great "total cinema" events
We already know that Glasgow Film Festival is set to open with a bang in the form of Coen Brothers comedy Hail, Caesar! and close on a bittersweet grace note with Charlie Kaufman’s celebrated stop-motion animation Anomalisa, and looking at the programme, which was announced today, there’s plenty to enjoy between these two bookends.
Sightseers director Ben Wheatley will be in town with High-Rise, his take on J.G. Ballard’s study in class and human depravity. We expect a less extreme look at the human condition in Time Out Of Mind, in which Richard Gere plays a homeless man adrift in New York – the Hollywood star will be in Glasgow for this UK premiere. Game of Thrones fans will be pleased to hear that a couple of the show’s stars will also be attending Glasgow Film Festival with their latest films: Natalie Dormer will walk GFF's red carpet for the UK premiere of horror The Forest and Hannah Murray comes to the festival with Bridgend, which looks at the suicide ‘epidemic’ that struck a small Welsh town in the mid 2000s.
Also confirmed to attend is Lucile Hadžihalilović, the brilliant French director who’ll be presenting her beguiling new film, Évolution, a sci-fi body horror in the vein of HP Lovecraft and David Cronenberg. Legendary director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) will be there to discuss his new film Eisenstein in Guanajuato and look back across his career in an In Conversation event. We’re also excited to hear from stuntman Vic Armstrong, who’s stood in for the likes of Harrison Ford (in the Indiana Jones films) and Christopher Reeves (in Superman) – he'll be introducing the festival's great-looking screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and discussing his 50-year career.
Talking of great events, Glasgow Film Festival have outdone themselves this year with its special site-specific screenings. Fancy seeing blistering TV news satire Network within the bowels of BBC Scotland? How about experiencing the romance and glamour of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet at a masked ball in Glasgow’s Trade Hall (complete with fishtank and cocktails served in poison vials)? Maybe you’d like to watch David Lynch’s Wild at Heart while being entertained by an Elvis impersonator more over-the-top than Nic Cage? And talking of Nic Cage, how would you like to be bundled onto a GFF prison bus, where you’ll be handed an orange jumpsuit, handcuffed, and taken to a top-secret location for a very special screening of insane Cage actioner Con Air? GFF have become the masters of these kind of ‘total film’ experiences and these are just a few of the event screenings they have up their sleeves this year.
Other films that have caught our eye include Demolition, the new film from Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club), starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts; Miguel Gomes’ dreamlike and imaginative trilogy Arabian Nights; James White, which we hear is a smart and soulful study following a self-pitying brat who has to man-up when his mother needs his care; Turkish drama Mustang, which follows five orphaned sisters fighting the misogyny of their strict guardians; No Home Movie, the final film from the great Chantal Akerman; Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to Blue Ruin, which stars nice-guy thesp Sir Patrick Stewart as the leader of a neo-Nazi group; Pablo Larrain’s bracing drama The Club, a darkly comic study of guilt and punishment following several priests who have been banished from their parishes; devilish horror Goodnight Mommy, in which twin boys start to suspect the woman taking care of them is not their mother; Office, a musical from Hong Kong action maestro Johnnie To; and Don Cheadle’s love letter to Miles Davis, Miles Ahead, in which Cheadle plays the jazz legend.
Parts of the festival also act as a serendipitous celebration of the life of the late, great David Bowie. Films like The Man Who Fell to Earth (screening at Glasgow Science Centre Planetarium) and D A Pennebaker’s brilliant concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (screening with short doc Let’s Dance: Bowie Down Under) were planned long before the musical maverick passed away on 10 Jan, but these great films will be given added poignancy in the wake of the news.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. “The 2016 Glasgow Film Festival programme is bursting with must-see movies and events,” said GFF co-director Allan Hunter. “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?” Where else indeed?
Follow all The Skinny’s coverage of Glasgow Film Festival over at www.theskinny.co.uk/festivals/uk-festivals/film and be sure to pick up the CineSkinny, the official GFF magazine, during the festival at GFF venues.
Tickets for Glasgow Film Festival go on sale 10am on Mon 25 Jan. The full programme is available on the Glasgow Film Festival website. Further guests attending will be announced nearer to the festival date – so watch this space