Film Event Highlights – July 2012

Two events this month aim to reintroduce previously abandoned film footage to a new audience. In Edinburgh, cinema collective Screen Bandita are hosting Ritualised Frequencies, a night of film, music, and art, on 21 July at the Church of the Sacred Heart. Archival anthropological 16mm films of different ritualistic activities will be screened, accompanied by live music by William Bennett (Cut Hands/ Whitehouse and Tattie Toes), which has been specially composed for the night, and a site-specific installation by artist Ariadne Xenou.

Alternatively, the Found Footage Festival makes its Scottish debut at the GFT in Glasgow on 8 July. This one-night-only festival, hosted by Joe Pickett (The Onion) and Nick Prueher (Late Show with David Letterman), showcases unintentionally funny footage discovered on VHS at car boot sales, rubbish dumps, thrift shops and warehouses across America and has already seen sell-out tours across the US and Canada. Consider this the anti-Youtube event of the month.

Club Noir continues to bring some glamour back to cinema with its film nights, showing two films from Hollywood's golden age: Gigi, which won nine Academy Awards in 1959, is screening at the Grosvenor in Glasgow (8 Jul), and Some Like it Hot, voted the greatest American comedy of all time by the American Film Institute, is screening at the Perth Playhouse (29 Jul). Both films will be preceded by a special burlesque act by one of the Club's performers, and guests are invited to dress to impress.

Author, comedian, singer-songwriter and now writer-director Tony Hawks (not the skateboarder) will be attending the Belmont in Aberdeen on 19 July for a Q&A session after a screening of his documentary, Playing the Moldovans at Tennis. The film sees Hawks attempt to track down the entire Moldovan football team and challenge them to a game of tennis, but what begins as a silly bet becomes more serious when he is confronted with many problems in the country. The night celebrates a good cause also, with the film's profits going to the Hippocrates Children's Centre in Moldova.

Finally, Grease is the word at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh on 20 and 21 July, when the cinema screens a special sing-along version of the iconic 1978 movie. After the success of previous sing-along screenings, including Calamity Jane, this promises to be a riotous and hugely entertaining evening - and if you don't happen to know every word of every great song, the lyrics are projected on screen. There really is no excuse not to join in. [Becky Bartlett]