“Sundance, Berlin, Glasgow!” – so is the trio of international film capitals proposed by festival director Allison Gardner at the launch of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival. It’s a knowingly irreverent suggestion, but it’s undeniable that GFF – now in its 20th year – consistently punches above its weight in the UK film calendar, arguably leading the pack of Scottish festivals ahead of its starry Edinburgh equivalent.

This year’s biggest coup is the opening gala, the Kristen Stewart-starring Love Lies Bleeding, which kicks off ten packed festival days. Receiving its UK premiere at GFF after screenings at – you guessed it! – Sundance and Berlin, the highly anticipated queer revenge thriller is lapped up by the lively Glasgow audience. In the subsequent Q&A, director Rose Glass (Saint Maud) offers anecdotes about Stewart calling her character the c-word, and Ed Harris – who plays her villainous father – supplying his own wig.

The festival’s central hub of activity is the Glasgow Film Theatre, the city’s iconic art deco cinema, which also celebrates its 50th birthday in 2024. Each day of the festival kicks off with a free screening on the cinema’s biggest screen, where caffeinated early-risers are rewarded with a gratis viewing of a classic from Mr Smith Goes to Washington to Foxy Brown. As I write this, I’m currently rallying a gang of fellow freelancing millennials to accompany me to Thursday’s 10am showing of Rian Johnson’s Brick – released in 2004, the year of the first GFF – which remains one of the most underrated teen weirdo films of the last few decades.

Aside from an arbitrary award given to visiting star Viggo Mortenson, GFF is admirably egalitarian; an audience-focused festival where punters, critics, staff, filmmakers and industry workers feel like one and the same. Aside from a couple of special events, all the screenings, talks and parties take place along the same strip in the city centre, meaning there’s both a genuine IRL buzz and a less frantic atmosphere than at festivals spread out across big cities. I spot a filmmaker and a few fellow critics at Saturday night’s movie karaoke, where guests take turns to belt out classic needle drops. The highlight? “Sweet Transvestite” from Rocky Horror. If you were there, I was the girl doing Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose”.

It’s perhaps the festival’s down-to-earth atmosphere that convinces Mortenson to stick around an extra day for a surprise Q&A at the second screening of his Western The Dead Don’t Hurt, to the delight of those who missed out on tickets for its UK premiere the night before. The relaxed vibe also results in a fantastic unabashed Q&A from Maxine Peake – here to support her strong performance in Alan Friel’s middling dystopian thriller Woken – who declares that “I’m no method actor…I mean, I’m not an arsehole”. Other guests spotted in the hallways of the GFT are Ben Wheatley, here to introduce a 15th-anniversary screening of Down Terrace, and local Oscar-winner Kevin Macdonald, representing his own High & Low: John Galliano, as well as Made in England, a documentary about his grandfather Emeric Pressburger’s collaborative relationship with Michael Powell, narrated by none other than Martin Scorsese.

The audience demand for a wide range of films also speaks to the festival’s egalitarian spirit. Big hitters like the charming Billy Connolly documentary Big Banana Feet and Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi romance The Beast are quick to sell out, but so are trickier prospects like Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s epic About Dry Grasses. Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World plays to a packed-out Friday night crowd, but fails to impress me despite its accumulating buzz – I think Jude would be pleased to know that it seems to be the most debated film of the festival. Aptly for a city hosting weekly protests against the genocide in Gaza, the longest queue I see is for the complex, West Bank-set drama The Teacher, shot by British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi entirely on location in the occupied territories. Even through the lens of fiction, it’s heartbreaking to be confronted with images that could no longer feasibly be made following the current destruction.

Although I thought it was my most niche pick, it proves impossible to score a friend an extra ticket for We Have Never Been Modern, Matej Chlupacek’s period drama with themes of prejudice against intersex people. Part of GFF’s strand of Czech cinema, the film is part detective story, part examination of societal attitudes in pre-war Europe, with a spellbinding central performance from Eliška Křenková. The film’s design is especially notable; cultivating sinister irony from the juxtaposition of chocolate box landscapes with mysteriously colour-coded costuming.

Stylistic big swings are also abundant in The Vourdalak, a notably folkloric vampire story by Adrien Beau, who has previously worked as a fashion and theatre designer. Kacey Mottet Klein plays a hapless French aristocrat who happens upon a creepy family, just as their supernatural secret reveals itself. The always fantastic Ariane Labed is the MVP, turning in a deliciously strange, deftly physical performance as the family’s spinster daughter. The film also features perhaps the most disarming puppet performance since Baby Annette, and teases out its central battle of patriarchal violence vs non-conformity through both its fable-esque story and its striking costume design.

Thanks to a handful of small but thoughtfully put-together strands, GFF’s repertory programming is also strong this year, and is largely led by up-and-coming Scottish curators. The feminist collective Invisible Women present a Dolores del Río retrospective, and Rosie Beattie’s What Will The Men Wear? series highlights the gender-subverting style of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn. My favourite screening of GFF so far comes courtesy of Love is Sweet, Oh!, a strand of films about Black people and people of colour experiencing love, curated by Tomiwa Folorunso.

Alongside well-known titles Bend It Like Beckham and Happy Together, Folorunso screens ‘90s Chicago-set Black rom-com Love Jones, starring Nia Long and Larenz Tate – a rarely-screened gem which has the most heartfelt audience reception I’ve experienced all festival. It’s off-the-beaten-track treats like this, alongside the more headline-grabbing films, that make GFF what it is: a warm, welcoming festival that doesn’t compromise on intelligent, thoughtful programming.

As the wintery, back-to-work blues of January finally begins to subside, we have news of a very bright near-future, as at the end of February the Glasgow Film Festival opens its doors once more for a special 20th anniversary jamboree of cinephile frolics. And we can tell you from experience that it’s a city that’s perfectly calibrated and designed for total immersion in that blissful festival vibe, and with their freshly-minted 2024 line-up all locked down and out in the world, we can’t wait to do it all over again.

Opening the festivities is Rose Glass’ violent opus, Love Lies Bleeding, the filmmaker’s follow-up to Saint Maud that stars Kristen Stewart and Katy M O’Brian, which comes directly off the back of a triumphant premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Things will round off in a more homely fashion with the world premiere of Janey, a profile documentary about the Scottish comedian and activist Janey Godley.

The festival is set to present 69 features culled from 37 countries this year, and we’re looking forward to the Greek-set drama, Drift, which stars Cynthia Erivo, Alia Shawkat and Honor Swinton Byrne (together at last!), as well as satire Coup! starring Peter Sarsgaard and Billy Magnussen, and the 16mm French vampire film The Vordalak starring the great Ariane Labed.

From the UK there’s Will Gilbey’s directorial debut, Jericho Ridge, a small-town policier about a sherriff under siege. There’s also The Old Man and the Land by Nicholas Paris, about an old man attempting to maintain his farmland despite the interruptions of his two adult kids (Rory Kinnear and Emily Beecham).

On the back of the massive BFI retrospective of Powell and Pressburger, there’s the chance to catch a new Martin Scorsese-narrated doc, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, from director David Hinton. There’s also another ace-looking filmmaking doc in the form of Jack Archer’s Bill Douglas: My Best Friend, on the life and work of the poetic Scottish maverick.

Of the things we’ve actually seen, we can heartily recommend trying to snag a ticket for Alice Rohrwacher’s graverobbing fantasia, La Chimera, in which a linen-suited Josh O’Connor dashes around Italy looking for signs of his lost love. We also love Bertrand Bonello’s eccentric, time-hopping AI romance, The Beast, and the ferocious debut feature Hoard by Luna Carmoon.

Elsewhere there’s a ton of amazing retrospective screenings tied to various local anniversaries (including 50 years since the inauguration of festival hub, the Glasgow Film Theatre). There’s a focus on Czech cinema and UK premieres of new 4K restorations of Scorsese’s After Hours, Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave and Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher.

Look, we we can’t namecheck everything because we’d be here all day, but you can peruse the line-up yourself via the festival website and dig out some of the gems that we’ve missed. Other than that, all that’s left to say is, roll on February 28…

The 20th Glasgow Film Festival runs from 28 February to 10 March 2024. glasgowfilm.org/home

Breaking up is hard to do, per 60s crooner Neil Sedaka’s classic song – Hal Porterfield (Christopher Abbott), presumptive heir to his father’s vast hotel fortune, is about to discover this as he attempts to end things with Rebecca (Margaret Qualley). The nature of their relationship blurs the line between personal and professional; she’s a no-contact dominatrix who specialises in verbal humiliation, and has been providing her services to Hal for a lengthy amount of time.

But with Hal’s father recently deceased, it’s time for him to ascend to the throne, and Porterfield Jr recognises the optics of being involved in a complex situationship with a sex worker might not be the best. He’s arranged one final tête-a-tête, in the plush suite of his father’s Denver hotel where they usually meet. But Rebecca hasn’t been playing this game only to lose the final hand. When Hal attempts to fob her off with a fancy watch and a handshake, she thinks she deserves a little more compensation.

Zachary Wigon’s sophomore feature – written by Micah Bloomberg – is a chamber piece for two, as Hal and Rebecca vie for the upper hand with bitter barbs and flirtatious exchanges, making it consistently difficult to tell who is prey and who is predator. In the age of sexless cinema we’re currently living through, it’s refreshing to see well-matched leads in film which doesn’t shy away from intimacy, though the script could perhaps delve more into the nature of Rebecca’s job and her motivation for doing it, and does in places echo more cliche views of sex work (ie. that its natural end point is romance, and that the women who do sex work are shrewish schemers looking to trap their clients for financial gain).

Despite the imperfections within Bloomberg’s screenplay, Abbott and Qualley sell the hell out of it – they possess an easy chemistry that fluctuates between desire, desperation and despisal. It’s the second time Abbott has starred in a film set in a hotel in which a blonde sex worker gets the better of him, and while Piercing was a more bloodthirsty affair, there’s plenty of psychological warfare taking place this time around.

As they verbally spar the lines blur between fantasy and reality, with Rebecca and Hal both withholding the truth about their emotions and intentions. The game of cat and mouse that takes place within their hotel room is enough to keep the viewer guessing, with Qualley in particular an intriguingly withholding performer, juxtaposing her expressiveness with hidden motivations, while Abbott plays the posturing rich kid with a meek side well. If anything, perhaps Sanctuary could stand to be a little bolder with its portrayal of a modern sub/dom relationship – Secretary this ain’t – but it’s a sleek, stylish romp all the same.

When the very first iPhone was unveiled in January 2007, it was the technological equivalent of crossing the Rubicon. Nothing was the same after Steve Jobs revealed his plan to combine the touch-screen capabilities of the ubiquitous iPod with a mobile phone, and 15 years later, Apple claimed the majority of the US smartphone market, despite consistently having the most expensive handsets out of any provider. But before Apple, there was another fruit-based titan of the smart phone industry, who finally get their dues in Matt Johnson’s offbeat comedy.

When we meet tech experts Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson), they’re pitching a new phone to disinterested corporate bod Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). The idea sounds simple by modern standards: put a computer in the consumer’s pocket. No one really thinks it’s possible – not least because Mike and Doug don’t exactly have the killer instinct when it comes to business. Jim eventually comes on board, sensing an opportunity (and fired from his previous job due to his, uh, uncooperative attitude) and handles the business side while Mike concentrates on the tech.

There’s no shortage of media reckoning with the technological boom of the 90s/00s, which arguably begin with David Fincher’s beloved Facebook drama The Social Network back in 2010. Since then there’s been two films about Steve Jobs, a series about the rise and fall of WeWork, a series about Theranos Girlboss Elizabeth Holmes, and even a clutch of films about various whistleblowers who used the internet and social media (Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, now Reality Winner) to expose the truth about government malpractice. Working in such a saturated corner of the biopic market, it’s wise that Johnson brings to the subject material his idiosyncratic filmmaking style, using a multi-cam set-up allowing for a more DIY style, and veering away from venerating the characters through displaying the flaws which were both features and bugs.

At moments it feels like BlackBerry is a parody of the genre – a moment which purports the phone was named after a breakfast stan on Lazaridis’ shirt is particularly cheeky – but the intention is definitely still to shine a light on an untold part of Canadian history, which played a major role in how we communicate today. It’s perhaps ironic that so much of worldwide communication has been dictated by a group of geeks who preferred to be shut in dark rooms hosting LAN parties or watching They Live for the hundredth time, but Johnson has a keen affection for his subjects, imbuing the material with humour and snappy pacing which keeps the audience on their toes.

Howerton is the stand-out performer as the bullish Balsillie, a shark in a fish pond, who is able to take BlackBerry from a single man cave in Waterloo, Ontario to a major player in North American communications in less than a decade. The contrast between Balsillie’s ruthless business mind and the awkward Lazaridis and Fregin is entertaining, and avoids the ‘difficult genius’ trope which haunts the subgenre by emphasising that BlackBerry was very much a team effort, and the individualism that followed later is part of the reason it failed.

For anyone that remembers how popular the BlackBerry was at the height of its fame, it’s a fun little jaunt down memory lane, but the film also highlights the problem with so much modern technology and the people involved in creating it: a lack of interest in the longevity or craft of their product. BlackBerry’s switch to cheaper manufacturing and continued failure to innovate, combined with the fracturing of their leadership due to financial greed and some dodgy stock optioning, puts the writing on the wall.

Entertainment reporters may throw around the phrase “festival season” because it sometimes helps us spin a narrative out of twelve months, but film festivals are really a year-round thing. Case in point: Sundance is currently in full swing, Berlin is raring and ready to go next month, and now the Glasgow Film Festival has filled in the next spot on the calendar with the unveiling of its program.

The full press blast teases a cavalcade of premieres at the global and UK-specific level, starting and ending with a pair of Sundance titles making their way across the Atlantic. As its opening night film, the festival has selected Adura Onashile’s debut Girl, a drama that sees an African mother and child new to Glasgow facing discrimination from locals as well as the haunting memories of their past.  For closing night, they’re bringing in Nida Manzoor’s action-comedy Polite Society, in which a British-Pakistani teen imagines herself as a martial arts heroine saving her older sister from the horrors of arranged marriage.

A handful of buzzy titles already seen elsewhere will attract some fresh eyeballs with a spot in Glasgow, including LWL fave How to Blow Up a Pipeline, starry Berlinale tech-world drama BlackBerry, the TIFF-approved BDSM character piece Sanctuary, Director’s Fortnight standout God’s Creatures, and also in from Cannes, the unorthodox family drama The Five Devils. Scotland’s premier film festival will also show some hometown pride by bringing in Kelly Macdonald for the UK premiere of Carol Morley’s road movie/Audrey Amiss biopic Typist Artist Pirate King.

As for world premieres, they’ve got I Am Weekender, which explores the legacy of a formative documentary about the 1992 acid house scene, later a major influence on Trainspotting; Dog Days, a Scottish production about a man living on the streets of Dundee and trying to turn his life around using his god-given musical talents; and the Muhammad Ali bio-doc Cassius X: Becoming Ali, a treasure trove of never-before-seen archival footage.

The main selection will be supplemented by an embarrassment of additional offerings, including the horror sidebar Frightfest (where attendees can see Blood and Honey, the freakshow taking full advantage of Winnie the Pooh’s entry into the public domain), a special section focused on the cinema of Spain (including Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Cannes-feted The Beasts), and a retrospective series of films featuring women seizing control of their lives (Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, and It Happened One Night, to name a few). There’s plenty more to peruse in the full listing at Glasow Film Fest’s official site, teasing a festival that’s not just a treat for locals, but a reason for visitors from around the world to set a course for Scotland.

The 19th Glasgow Film Festival will run from 1 to 12 March.

Warwick Ross and Robert Coe’s Blind Ambition follows four refugees on their lead up to becoming the first ever Zimbabwean team to compete in the World Wine Tasting Championship. Joseph, Marlvin, Pardon and Tinashe all fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa around a decade before their team was formed to escape the turmoil in their home country.

Initially entering the hospitality industry to support their families, each member of the eventual team gradually progressed from waiters to sommeliers due to their acquired taste to wine, consequentially abandoning the paths they had set out for their new lives in order to fully commit themselves to their craft. Surprisingly none of the four had met each other before moving to South Africa; it was a shared passion of wine mixed with a stroke of fate that brought the team together at a competition to find the next South African wine-tasting team.

Through a series of interviews with the team and their families throughout the film we realise the extent to which these men have defied all odds. Taking life-threatening passages to cross into South Africa, arriving with no money and facing the hardships of living in some of the country’s more dangerous settlements, the group must also contend with the struggle of entering as a refugee into a country still, to a great extent, bound to the racist ideology of its past. Before Ross and Coe even begin to delve into the race to the championships in France, the stories of these men’s journey from refugees to some of the best sommeliers in the country is a film-worthy underdog story in itself.

Ross and Coe’s style of filmmaking is simplistic, yet this is complimented by the unique and powerful story and the charismatic subjects of the documentary themselves. The Zimbabwean team are fun, passionate and make for an enjoyable watch as they come together, joking amongst themselves and with the documentary team.

Whether it be in teasing Pardon for his height during a friendly football game or dancing together whilst singing songs in Shona, they find ways to create moments of happiness and humour even through the obstacles they face, which unfortunately are still prevalent in their lives despite all they have overcome. This on-screen entertainment is not limited to the team; their coaches JV Ridon and Denis Garret (Garret especially) have vivacious personalities that introduce viewers to the elaborate dramas of the wine world.

What stands out most about the film is the Zimbabwean patriotism that resonates through the team. Whilst all four men were eager to flee their homeland it is clear that they are proud of their Zimbabwean nationality. Wine-tasting is definitely a niche interest, especially at a competitive stage, so it is powerful watching not only the pride of the team at the idea of bringing to light the talent of the Zimbabwean people on a global level, but also the support and pride of Zimbabwe as they witnessed the recognition of the team. It’s heartening to see Zimbabwe be defined not solely by the political or economic issues of their country, but by the great extent of their individual talents.

While there is a focus on the road to the championship and the outcome of the competition, the real joy of Blind Ambition is watching the strength and ambition in the team. How they not only changed the lives of themselves and their families, but also exposed the world to the untapped talent present in Zimbabwe.

Unlike many of its circuit siblings, the Glasgow Film Festival does not have the word ‘international’ in its title. But, for all its commitment to supporting local Scottish filmmaking, this is also a very outward-looking and cosmopolitan event. Here is a selection of seven films from GFF 2022 that were made in countries other than the UK and US, and are (largely) in languages other than English – including one from this year’s special African Stories strand.

1. The Girl and the Spider (Das Mädchen und die Spinne, 2021)

From Swiss twins Ramon and Silvan Zürcher, this bright, breezy and eccentric feature is a film of two apartments, and the aching gap between them. As Lisa (Liliane Amuat) moves on to a new place, leaving behind her flatmate Mara (Henriette Confurius), the transitional process, involving a flurry of packing and cleaning with help from neighbours, family and hired help, has everyone looking backwards, forwards and at each other. Amid all these gazes, some desirous, some jealous, there is much longing, but also loss, as the distracted Mara slowly comes to terms with the disappearance of her social web.

2. Once Upon A Time In Uganda (2021)

Cathryne Czubek and Hugo Perez’s documentary restages an odd-couple brotherhood: Ugandan brickmaker and self-taught filmmaker Isaac Nabwana who has transformed the ghetto of Wakaliga into a cottage industry for no-budget comic action cinema; and New Yorker Alan Hofmanis, drawn into ‘Wakaliwood’ after seeing an online trailer for one of Isaac’s many home-made movies. Together they work to get Isaac’s extensive oeuvre some international attention, and maybe even some money, while inventing what Alan terms the ‘beating-up-the-white-guy genre’. In this love letter to ‘outsider’ DIY filmmaking, cannibals will kung-fu and heads will explode.

3. Time of Impatience (Sabirsizlik zamani, 2021)

Writer/director Aydin Orak tells a bittersweet tale of young twin brothers, and of a two-tiered society. Mirza and Mirhat (Mirza and Mirhat Zarg) live with their father (an autodidact labourer), mother and sister in the impoverished, largely Kurdish Lower Neighbourhood of a Turkish city, while finding themselves excluded from the Upper Neighbourhood’s swimming pool by a club-wielding security guard who is also their neighbour. Over a long hot summer, the boys will try to get in, while learning lessons – from their father, and a teacher, and life – about the universality of the social injustice that they experience and attempt, radically if vainly, to resist.

4. Silent Land (Cicha ziemia, 2021)

“It’s broken” are the first words spoken in Agnieszka Woszczynska’s feature debut, as Adam (Dobromir Dymecki) describes to his wife Anna (Agnieszka Zulewska) the state of an electric fan in their luxury rented villa. While vacationing on an Italian island, this privileged young Polish couple responds to a Force Majeure-like accident with amoral selfishness, and then must live with themselves – and each other – as guilt and shame keep bobbing back to the surface. Unfolding with Haneke-an aloofness, this is a chilling portrait of a marriage that does not even know yet that it’s broken.

5. Karmalink (2021)

“I’m just helping Leng Heng sort out his past lives,” says resourceful orphan detective Srey Leak, as she joins the young boy on a treasure hunt for a golden Buddha statuette, buried as much in his memories as in the earth, on the shifting margins of a future Phnom Penh. Like Kim Jee-woon’s short film The Heavenly Creature, Jake Wachtel’s neon-lit feature explores the murky intersection of enlightenment and artificial intelligence, as the concepts of reincarnation and karma are given new expression in an era when dreams can be electronically visualised, memories of past lives recorded, and consciousness digitally transferred.

6. Happening (L’événement, 2021)

Audrey Diwan’s feature is presented in Academy ratio  a format already long out of fashion in the early Sixties when it is set, but capturing the narrowing horizons of protagonist Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei). A bright, promising student with a real chance to escape her provincial working-class roots, Anne finds herself with “the illness that only strikes women, and turns them into housewives”  at a time when abortion was strictly outlawed. “You have no choice,” a doctor tells her, as the film, calibrated in passing weeks, closely tracks Anne’s efforts – greatly circumscribed and increasingly desperate – to choose her own future.

7. Wild Men (Vildmænd, 2021)

Thomas Daneskov’s film begins with a man crying. Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) is sat on a mountain, dressed in animal skins and armed with a bow, but he is not the actual Viking he would like to be, but a modern-day working husband and father suffering a midlife crisis (of masculinity), and in flight from his regular Danish life to the Norwegian fjords. When he meets the similarly fugitive Danish drug dealer Musa (Zaki Youssef), and both are pursued by lonely cop Øyvind (Bjørn Sundquist) and Musa’s vicious colleagues, wild Coen-esque caper comedy ensues. But the pervasive air of sadness from the beginning never quite leaves these simple men.

The spirit of executive producer Danny Boyle looms large over Creation Stories, a biopic of Scottish businessman Alan McGee, whose influential Creation Records label launched such acts as Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and Oasis. Trainspotting seems a conscious influence on director Nick Moran’s film, from the editing style and frenetic pacing to Irvine Welsh being one of its screenwriters. The presence of Ewen Bremner as McGee only hammers home the connection.

But there’s another filmmaker looming over Creation Stories. Someone who also made a largely comedic, self-reflexive biopic concerning a British record label head who was inspired by seeing Sex Pistols perform, which covered a similar period of time: Michael Winterbottom. Speeding through three decades’ worth of events but lacking any actual momentum, Creation Stories is like a version of 24 Hour Party People gone horribly wrong.

In a 2019 interview with NME, McGee mentioned that the film would take some liberties in adapting his autobiography, specifically highlighting the inclusion of a reconciliatory reunion with his father (played by Skids frontman Richard Jobson), who he apparently hasn’t actually spoken to in many years. That creative choice is indicative of Moran and screenwriters Welsh and Dean Cavanagh wanting to make McGee’s story palatable to the widest audience possible.

With that in mind, the narrative rabbit holes the film ventures down prove especially baffling. One example is a sequence that is neither remotely compelling nor humorous, in which McGee, at the height of his mid-’90s drug problems, spends a night cruising around Los Angeles with an unbearable film producer acquaintance (Jason Isaacs). Earlier, a drug-induced vision of noted occultist Aleister Crowley (Steven Berkoff) hangs out with McGee in a bathroom; this is in no way relevant to the rest of the film.

Hallucinations, played for both tragic and ostensibly comic purposes, are a recurring motif, though none is quite so jarring as when the film abruptly switches from Leo Flanagan as a young McGee to Bremner playing him while he’s still meant to be in his early twenties. Contributions from the supporting cast amount to single-scene appearances by familiar faces (Ed Byrne as Alastair Campbell, Jason Flemyng as a promoter), some of whom Moran has worked with as an actor – the director pops up himself, too, playing Malcolm McLaren like a haunted scarecrow.

The manipulation of McGee and Oasis in the election of Tony Blair drives much of the third act, which leads to the most discombobulating ‘cameo’ of the entire film. Trying to pin down the new Prime Minister at Chequers for a chat about helping unemployed musicians, McGee is horrified by the presence of Jimmy Savile (Alistair McGowan) cosying up to the leader. It’s framed as McGee’s dawning realisation that New Labour might be a con, having apparently heard credible rumours of Saville’s predatory sexual abuse through music industry associates.

Considering that McGee’s actual autobiography suggests he “had no idea [Savile] was a nonce, just a dirty old fucker”, it comes across as a forced, uncomfortable mea culpa for simply having met the man once.

The 2020 Glasgow Film Festival seems as if it occurred a lifetime ago. It must have been one of the last live, in-person festivals where people could actually utter the words “Is this seat taken?” prior to the world being nudged off a cliff and its populous subsequently locked behind a laptop screen for almost a year. Heeding government guidance, Glasgow is back this year as a digital-only festival, offering up its usual bounty of world and local cinema, but asking you to provide your own snacks.

The festival itself works so well because it trades on that live aspect and uses cinema to both serve and enthral the public. Alongside their screenings at the Glasgow Film Theatre, the CCA and other venues, the programming is geared towards bringing people together to experience films in unique ways, whether that’s in the company of directing or acting talent, or in a unique spot that isn’t usually known for screening films (I once saw Dawn of the Dead screened in a shopping centre, for example).

It sounds like I’m rubbing salt in the wound a bit, and I won’t lie: it’s sad not to be able to hop up to the festival as it is, without doubt, one of the most fun and community-minded festivals on the calendar. But it’s also great that they are marching on and, like all arts organisations worth their salt, allowing necessity to be the mother of invention. So it’s a digital festival this year, boasting eight world premieres, three European premieres, and a whopping 48 UK premieres.

Things are kicking off in the best way imaginable, with the first UK screening of Lee Isaac Chung’s delightful Oscar-hopeful, Minari, about a South Korean family who, during the 1980s, have decamped to Arkansas (via California) in search of their fortune, but also some profound connection to the local landscape. Closing things out is Spring Blossom, the debut feature by 21-year-old Suzanne (daughter of Vincent) Lindon.

This isn’t really the place to namecheck everything playing in the festival, but we’ll try our best to pick out some of the things that tickle our own fancy. You’re not going to want to miss Ben Sharrock’s Limbo, which examines the grim process of acquiring refugee status in the UK with a levity and sense of humour that lifts it above more dour works on the subject.

We’re also intrigued by Creation Stories, a chronicle of Scottish impresario Alan McGee and the founding of his iconic label Creation Records, which is penned by Irvine Welsh, directed by Nick Moran and stars Ewen Bremner. Remaining on the music tip there’s Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, a new film about the charismatic frontwoman of zany punk stalwarts X-Ray Spex.

Elsewhere there’s the French kitchen sink fantasy Gagarine, about a derelict Parisian housing estate that one man decides to transform into a space station, Black Bear, which is billed as a psychosexual drama starring the always-reliable Aubrey Plaza. There’s also a chance to catch up with the new film by the grandfather of militantly objective observational documentary, as Frederick Wiseman’s widely-lauded City Hall will receive a screening.

As well, there’s a sidebar in which GFF partners up with the Shanghai Film Festival to trade some of its top titles, and there’s also a country focus on South Korea, offering audiences a chance to survey the cinematic fruits from a country in the midst of a major creative boom. There is also Arrow Video’s FrightFest weekender which offers up the gorehounds among us a mini selection of current horror film treats.

The Glasgow Film Festival runs from 24 February to 7 March. Tickets go on sale from 12 noon on 18 January and can be purchased from glasgowfilm.org

There’s a level of warm intimacy at the Glasgow Film Festival that you just don’t get elsewhere. It’s like being on the periphery of a big family meal and watching as everyone mucking in to make certain that everyone has their seat at the table.

It might be something to do with the narrow corridors and the dinky bar space (not a criticism!) at the Glasgow Film Theatre, the festival’s central screening hub. It’s very easy to bump into people you know, or spot programmers and filmmakers milling about ahead of their next Q&A or intro. Seeing the same faces lends the event a subtle sense of comforting cohesion, even as the programme itself covers a wide range of subjects, styles and locales.

My festival began in the most roistering and collegiate style imaginable, at a rep screening of 1994’s Tammy and the T-Rex. The film sees tousle-haired jock Michael, played by Paul Walker, having his brain transplanted into the head of an animatronic T-Rex after he is mauled by a lion in a local safari park.

Denise Richards’ cheergirl Tammy has the hots for Michael, much to the violent chagrin of her psychotic partner Billy (George Pilgrim), who hounds the lovestruck quarterback to the point of near-death. When Tammy quickly realises it’s Michael’s brain powering the T-Rex on a gore-soaked killing spree, she rekindles her love for him and tries her utmost to free him.

The film was made because a South American entrepreneur got hold of an animatronic T-Rex and writer/director Stewart Raffill (the mind behind Mac and Me) wrote something which he could shoot close to his house in Texas. All the splatter scenes were eventually expunged so the film would achieve a PG-13 rating, but no-one went to see it.

Now, the American distributor Vinegar Syndrome, who specialise in artworks of ill repute, have restored and recut the film, bringing it back to its former gory glory. At the screening I attended, many viewers were swigging from wine bottles and bellowing invective at the scene, a noise to be heard amid the rounds of howling laughter. Although its tongue is definitely set firmly in its cheek, this gaudy relic has the potential to become a late night phenomenon á la The Room. Just don’t let James Franco see it!

From tinkering with a botched future classic to building a movie around your obsession with an actress: the title of Chiara Malta’s Simple Women is a nod back to Hal Hartley’s 1992 film Simple Men, which contained within it an iconic dance sequence set to Sonic Youth’s ‘Kool Thing’ and led by Elina Löwensohn’s mysterious epileptic Elina.

When aspiring film director and Simple Men superfan Federica (Jasmine Trinca) bumps into Elina Löwensohn on the streets of Rome, she pitches a biopic of her life to be filmed in her native Bucharest. Löwensohn hesitatingly accepts, and what begins as a chance for the actress to revisit her tumultuous youth, soon turns sour when arguments erupt about who the subject’s life really belongs to. It’s certainly a novel, well-executed rumination on the physical and emotional logistics of filmmaking, even if it does lack for a satisfying conclusion.

Of a more serious political stripe was Amjad Abu Alala’s You Will Die at 20, a slickly-realised Sudanese teen movie with a macabre twist. As a baby, Muzamil is taken to a naming ceremony overseen by the Sheik, and when one of her dervishes faints at a key moment, it is pronounced that the child will – per the title – die at the age of 20. Very quickly, Muzamil’s father ships out, claiming that he’ll find work abroad and send back money, but the reality is that he can’t bear the shame.

The boy his confined to his house, mocked and abused by his peers, and thought to be a dead loss to the community. He memorises the Quran, but nobody really cares. The curse shapes everything about him, even his reticence to forge human connections. The film slowly, carefully rolls towards a denouement in which we are able to witness the results of his two-decade existential breakdown. It’s a little laconic and occasionally a little overwrought, but it’s impressive as a debut feature, both in its visuals which play on the high contrast of sun and shade, and the subtle power of the performances.

Familiarity at film festivals – just as in real life – can breed contempt, so it’s always worth straying a little off the beaten track. Using residual director recognition, or festival awards as a guiding light, can only get you so far. I took a chance on Ulrich Thomsen’s Gutterbee, a tiresomely wacky slice of Southern Gothic which was made worthwhile by Ewen Bremner playing an expat German sausage butcher who is clearly based on Werner Herzog.

The biggest surprise of the festival was Katharine O’Brien’s Lost Transmissions, in which Simon Pegg proves there’s more than one string to his acting bow by playing a man suffering the adverse psychological effects of years heavy drug abuse. It’s a rough-edged film, but everything about it feels ripped from an ostensibly credible reality.

The way O’Brien depicts the cruel bureaucracy of the various treatment centres and the difficulty of seeing a close friend in a new light is both detailed and affecting, with Juno Temple on fine form as the electropop singer-songwriter who falls into caring for this lost soul.

I feel like, in all, I was only able to dip the point of one toe into the deep waters of this festival, but all I can say for certain is that it was very warm (like usual) and I’m certainly hankering wade in a bit deeper next year.