Scottish Film Event Highlights – June 2016

AiM: African Hopes, Beats and Dreams

The mighty Africa in Motion are heading to CCA in June to shed some light on pertinent and contemporary issues facing Africa with film tour African Hopes, Beats and Dreams. First up in the trio of screenings is The Dream of Shahrazad (8 Jun), a beautiful doc examining the Arab Spring through epic fairy tale collection One Thousand and One Nights. That’s followed by Beats of the Antonov (10 Jun), a doc about the people of the Blue Nile’s inspiring response to Sudan's civil war. And then there’s Hope (18 Jun), a touching migrant story following a young Nigerian woman and a Cameroonian man battling brutal odds to reach the shores of Spain.

Nightcleaners

Cinema-goers of a revolutionary inclination won’t want to miss GFT’s screening of Nightcleaners (5 Jun), a landmark work of British political cinema and feminist filmmaking. The film documents the fight by women who cleaned office blocks at night in London to fight for better pay and working conditions. Don’t go along expecting a straightforward blow-by-blow account: shot by the Berwick Collective in grainy B&W 16mm, the film began as conventional agitprop but morphed during the editing stage into a doc whose form is as radical as its politics. It’s a screening to stimulate, enrage and challenge.

Forbidden Zone

Long before he became Tim Burton's go-to composer, Danny Elfman gave a wild performance as the Devil in a cult film much weirder than anything his regular collaborator could ever come up with. Directed by Elfman’s brother Richard, Forbidden Zone (16 Jun) is a wild brew of sci-fi musical, bawdy comedy and badshit dada adventure following a family as they one-by-one enter the "sixth dimension" through a door in their basement. Presented by Matchbox Cinemaclub, it’s their final screening at The Old Hairdressers before moving to pastures new at CCA. They’re leaving with a bang!

Comic Con

Meanwhile… Comic Con returns to CCA, and they're screening a trio of comic book movies just pulpy enough to counteract the bombast of Batman v Superman, Captain America: Civil War et al and remind us to not take these films too seriously. There’s the 90s shoestring version of Captain America (29 Jun) before he turned into dull super-hunk Chris Evans, the pun-tastic Batman & Robin (30 Jun), and the surprisingly endearing Swamp Thing (1 Jul), from the late Wes Craven.

Indie Scottish Short Films

Finally, Blueprint returns to GFT for its fourth edition (16 Jun) with another lineup of micro-budget shorts. Expect an exploration of mental health in the wake of personal trauma shot on a mobile (Divulgence), a love story set in an Orwellian future (The English Lesson), and the delightfully named Reservoir Dugs, a shot for shot film remake of Tarantino’s debut film’s opening diner scene, with its trademark dialogue given a Glasgow twist.

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If you've a film event you'd like us to know about, send details to jamie@theskinny.co.uk