GSFF 2017: Five short film programmes not to miss

Is it GSFF’s tenth anniversary or only its ninth? Well to tell you the truth, during all the exciting previous editions of the festival, we kind of lost track ourselves. All we know is that back in 2008, the Glasgow Film Festival grew a funky little extra limb devoted to short film, and since then GSFF – which became a stand-alone event three years ago – has blossomed to be one of the absolute highlights in the Scottish cultural calendar.

This year’s playful and political programme looks to be one of the strongest in the festival’s short history. There are three – newly pertinent – programmes on sovereignty, a night of film and jazz, and some tantalising virtual reality shorts as well as a symposium on VR’s growing reach. GSFF also marks its tenth edition with a great-looking programme of nine shorts hand-picked from each of the previous editions of the festival – any further opportunity to see modern classics like Jamie Travis’ The Saddest Boy in the World or Johannes Nyholm’s Las Palmas is fine with us.

We’ve already recommended five of the shorts from the Scottish Competition to seek out, now here are our recommendations for the five must-attend, specially curated short film events in the programme.

The Magic Lantern Returns

That first edition of GSFF back in 2008 was curated by Rosie Crerar and Penelope Bartlett, the duo behind the much-missed short film night the Magic Lantern. To mark this tenth edition, Crerar and Bartlett are returning to GSFF with a spiky programme of shorts championing women filmmakers.

The line-up is immaculate. The great Margaret Tait is represented by A Portrait of Ga, the Orcadian filmmaker’s poetic love letter to her mother. Then there’s Jane Campion’s strangely menacing Peel, which follows a family of three on a resentment-filled road trip on a sunbaked Australian highway. Even stranger is The Amateurist, a typically slippery video work from Miranda July.

We love the sound of Morag McKinnon's Home too, which is described by Magic Lantern as a wicked comedy about a housing inspector that “begins to feel like scenes from a Scottish Twin Peaks.” It’s joined by Anahita Ghazvinizadeh's Needles, a heartbreaking coming-of-age tale of ear piercing and domestic tragedy, and Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts, a visually stunning film that tells an alternative history of the 1960s Zambian space programme.

“These are our favourite kinds of short films,” says Magic Lantern, “films which take risks, experiment with content and form, by filmmakers with strong, distinct voices who create fully realised, compelling worlds.” Sounds like our kind of short films too.

Fri 17 Mar, CCA, 7pm

Gunhild Enger retrospective

The retrospective screenings are always a treat at GSFF, and this year’s focus on Norwegian filmmaker Gunhild Enger should be particularly rewarding. Why? Well the simple answer is: her films are hilarious. There’s the single shot gem Premature, which features the most awkward car journey in history as a Norwegian man brings his Spanish wife home to meet the parents, who can’t help but say the wrong things; the bureaucratic absurdity of The Committee, where delegates from Sweden, Norway and Finland try to agree on an artwork to place on the geographical point where their three nations meet; the culture-clash cringe of Subtotal, when a bargain hunting Norwegian couple encounter a Swedish salesman while crossing the border to stock up on cheap ski poles. Not to mention wordless mini-masterpiece A Simple Life, in which the life of suburban leisure is shown to be anything but simple.

Programme 1: Earthly Delights, 16 Mar, CCA, 7pm | Programme 2: Enlightenment, 17 Mar, CCA, 7pm 

When I Say Vagina…

The US President is grabbing them, the UK government has outlawed their ejaculations, so GSFF thought it was time to celebrate “lady bits, muffins, beavers, flowers, tacos, cooches…” or whatever your prefered euphemism is for vagina. Those who loved GSFF’s Borscht Corporation retrospective will be delighted that Mayer/Leyva’s lip-syncing vaginas music video Glazin’ will be back. There’s also a trio of animations, including Lori Malépart-Traversy’s The Clitoris, which inspired the whole programme.

“This programme had to be about more than just funny talking vaginas – although we do have those,” wrote GSFF programmer Sanne Jehoul. “But we also touch upon the continuing practice of female genital mutilation around the world, in the moving I Was Five When I Became A Woman, and the obscured history of virginity tests on Asian immigrant women arriving in the UK in the 1970s, in Borders.”

16 Mar, Joytown Grand Electric Theatre, 9pm

An Evening with Bukowski

The UK premiere of Matteo Borgardt’s You Never Had It: An Evening with Bukowski is another must-attend. Based on a 1981 interview with Bukowski that was thought lost for over 30 years, the film shows the poet and writer talking long into the night as he smokes cigarettes and drinks wine with his soon-to-be wife, Linda Lee Beighle, and italian journalist Silvia Bizio, who's conducting the interview. The film also features poems read by Bukowski himself over footage of today's LA shot in Super8.

After the film, the night will continue with live performances from poets including Stephen Watt, whose 'crime poetry’ addresses Glasgow's gritty underbelly, and from musicians including Jacob Yates And The Pearly Gate Lock-Pickers.

17 Mar, Joytown Grand Electric Theatre, 9pm

Blueprint: B-Roll

Bryan M Ferguson has one of the most interesting eyes in Scottish filmmaking. We loved his beautiful and bizarre short Caustic Gulp (about a chlorine-drinking cult in Florida) so much we named it winner of the Skinny’s Short Film Competition. We’ve yet to experience his sensibilities as a programmer, but you can do just that at GSFF as Ferguson teams up with indie short film night Blueprint for a programme of shorts that promise to “mangle your mind and warp your sense of humour.”

18 Mar, CCA, 9.15pm

---

GSFF runs 15-19 Mar. Head to glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-short-film-festival for full details