Glasgow Film Festival: Meet the Team
What does it take to put on a film festival? We meet four of the cogs in the machine that is Glasgow Film Festival, one of our favourite UK film events, and find out how their roles help shape the festival. It's not just watching movies, you know!
Allan Hunter (Festival co-director)
What does your job entail?
Mostly watching films, shaping the programme, deciding the annual country focus, choosing the retrospectives and being aware that the festival is very much a great big team effort.
What’s the best part of your job?
Meeting and spending time with the filmmakers is a great privilege, as is the chance to attend some of the bigger world film festivals like Cannes and Toronto. Also, when a film you have chosen is sold out and embraced by the audience. Just the sense of discovery you can have, say, when watching a submission like Patrick Wang’s In the Family a few years back and falling in love with a brand-new filmmaker.
What’s your favourite GFF memory?
I have a great soft spot for Richard Johnson, star of the 2015 Audience Award winner Radiator, which is now on release. He was such a delight, such a charmer and full of tales from a well-lived life. Sadly he died later in the year.
What would you love to screen to a GFF audience and why?
Orson Welles' legendary The Other Side of the Wind, because it would mean that it was completed, rescued from the vaults and finally able to see the light of day more than 40 years after they began shooting.
Rachel Fiddes (Festival manager)
What does your job entail?
My job is quite broad: I look after funding applications, financial management, staffing, logistics and all the other bits and pieces that need to be done to deliver the festival. I love working with the team here at GFF – we have such a great group of temporary staff that come back each year. We’re really lucky to have such a clever, skilled and committed bunch of people, who work so hard to put on such a great event.
What’s your favourite memory of working at film festivals?
I have so many great memories from past film festivals – most of these feature some of the great festival guests that I have been lucky enough to meet. One of my top memories is being driven around in a limousine sitting on the back seat between Patrick Stewart and Sean Connery – and they were both wearing kilts!
What would you love to screen to a GFF audience and why?
I am a bit into 50s B-movies at the moment – and would love to drop one of these into the programme some day!
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Emma McIntyre (event manager)
What does your job entail?
I work to create immersive environments for our audience to reconsider and experience film. This involves selecting films, developing relationships with new venues across the city, creating a programme that caters for our diverse audience and then creating the event with unique additions including music, performance and many other experiences! I also work on our opening and closing parties, and special projects of immersive cinema.
What’s the best part of your job?
I get to meet new people all the time, and work live and on large scales. I collaborate with musicians, artists, actors and anyone else that will work with me (!) to bring together art forms and create immersive cinematic experiences that suggest new ways to consider what we know and love about cinema.
What’s your favourite memory from past GFF events?
Wings of Desire at Paisley Abbey. Definitely. That was a very ambitious event and a real development for GFF into immersive cinema, which has given us a whole new platform to progress from.
I worked with trapeze performers, musicians and artists. I set things on fire, I learned about the choir in the abbey, and our audience ate German food, drank great coffee whilst being transported into another world to then watch an incredibly beautiful film... Amazing!
Sean Greenhorn (GFF programmer)
What does your job entail?
I programme the Sound & Vision strand, which is our dedicated programme focusing on music and film. It is a passion of mine, and I am really fortunate to be able to do it. I get to watch a lot of the latest films in the genre, and decide what should get shown at the festival. I also work with some interesting musicians for some great Sonic Cinema events.
What’s the best part of your job?
The best part of my job is the crucial bit – watching great films and deciding whether or not to show them to an audience (…there is more to my job by the way).
What’s your favourite memory from past GFFs?
The year I first started working at GFF (as a programming assistant), I organised the Admiral Fallow: We Are Ten event, which was a huge success and it was great to work collaboratively with the musicians and filmmaker.
What film would you secretly love to screen to a GFF audience and why?
I would love to screen the entire The Decline of Western Civilization trilogy by Penelope Spheeris, which is a series of films charting 80s and 90s punk and metal music scenes in LA. Actually... to be honest the films were just released on DVD this year and I probably will find an excuse to screen them at some point, so I have just given that surprise away.