Due South: Southside Film Festival 2011

Glasgow’s Southside – as well as being home to two of the city’s cultural jewels, Tramway and The Burrell Collection – has a strong film heritage. Peter Mullan, one of our finest filmmakers, is a resident and his most recent feature, Neds, a coming-of-age fable set in the tinderbox milieu of 70s Glasgow's gang culture, was filmed there. It might come as a surprise, then, that those poor cineastes in Shawlands, Queen’s Park and Pollokshields had to schlep north to see Mullan's film on the big screen as there’s no Southside cinema. In fact, the community doesn’t even have any regular film events. It was this revelation that inspired Karen O’Hara to create The Southside Film Festival: “It seemed like a good idea to bring people together to watch films south of the Clyde. With the help of volunteers, the support of filmmakers and of local venues, the film festival will run over one weekend in May (13-15).”

Without a local picture house to screen films, Karen and her team have had to be creative. Venues for the inaugural festival are a mix of unconventional spaces, including an old man’s social club, an abandoned swimming pool and a cavernous nightclub. These eccentric locations are matched by an eclectic programme, which takes in feature films, shorts (including two programmes from the mighty Glasgow Short Film Festival team), archive footage, artists’ films and animation as well as filmmaking workshops and panel events.

Opening with quirky Glasgow-set comedy-drama American Cousins (which will be followed by a Q&A with its Southsider screenwriter, Sergio Casci) and closing with F. W. Murnau’s 1922 horror masterpiece Nosferatu (accompanied by a live score from Larry McGuire), there’s much to enjoy in this three day film festival. Highlights over the weekend look to be a showcase from Glasgow music promo wizards The Forest of Black, two documentaries (Save Our Pool and Making Waves) about Govanhill Baths, which will screen inside the closed swimming pool, and Billy Wilder’s wonderful The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, an underrated gem from the filmmaking great’s late period.

Admission for ticketed events are £5 and available at the venue half an hour before. Many screenings are donations only. See the festival’s website for more details.