Three must-attend 2014 film festivals

Looking to make a New Year’s resolution? Here’s one we’d heartily recommend. Instead of joining a gym, cutting your alcohol intake back to a bottle of wine a night or switching to low-fat mayo, you should endeavour to do something more edifying, like attending a film festival or two.

Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) has been quietly growing over the last decade to become one of the biggest film festivals in the country (only London and Edinburgh can boast more attendees), but what makes it such a joy to attend is that it still retains an intimate flavour. It’s managed the tricky balancing act of attracting world premieres and big stars (guests at the 2013 event included Joss Whedon, John C. Reilly and Saoirse Ronan) without succumbing to the trappings of ‘more prestigious’ festivals. It has red carpet glamour when it’s called for but always feels laid back and inclusive; turn up in tux and tails or t-shirt and jeans – either way you’ll feel right at home.

Some details of the 2014 festival, which takes place 20 Feb-2 Mar, are beginning to emerge. Chile will be the annual country of focus and, in the retrospective strand, which is usually reserved for a single film star, the festival celebrates a whole year of Hollywood cinema. Specifically, 1939, the year in which the Glasgow Film Theatre, the home and chief hub of GFF, was opened. As the golden age of American cinema goes, 1939 was a particularly good vintage, with Stagecoach, Ninotchka and The Wizard of Oz among the classics released that year and screening in the GFF’s new Hooray for Hollywood strand.

As well as classic films and the latest premieres, GFF also has a flair for more unconventional festival happenings. Last year, for example, they screened Walter Hill’s cult classic The Warriors in the city’s underground (if you know the film you’ll recognise it as an inspired setting) and Jaws on a century-old sailing ship (we can only assume that festival organisers cried out, “we’re going to need a bigger boat” when this screening sold out). GFF will be revealing some of its more singular events before the end of the year. Look to www.glasgowfilm.org/festival for more details.

Innovative pop-up programming is also the strength of Birmingham’s Flatpack Festival. Taking place in the city’s long-abandoned factory and warehouse district, Flatpack’s programme is, shall we say, eclectic. ‘The kind of work we put on depends upon the project,’ Flatpack say on their website, ‘but recurring themes include animation, music, artists’ film, archive discoveries, offbeat shorts for kids and live cinema.’ They also manage to squeeze in the occasional bog-standard movie too.

What Flatpack do best is create a sense of occasion. They like to explore, as they say themselves, that ‘fertile territory where film bumps up against other art forms, showing people things they might not otherwise have seen.’ This sensibility is evident in some of the events already announced for Flatpack 8 (20-30 Mar), such as the UK premiere of The World Made of Itself, in which filmmaker Miwa Matreyek interacts with her own animation, and Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, a film made around the turn of the 19th century featuring theatre and variety stars of the day, restored by the Cinémathèque Française and accompanied by a new live score.

A more focused festival programme can be found at Manchester’s ¡Viva! (7-23 Mar), the UK’s largest celebration of Spanish and Latin America cinema. The festival turns 20 in March and the few crumbs of information that have slipped out suggest it’s going to be a stellar year.

Among the ¡Viva! titles revealed so far, we can highly recommend Diego Quemada-Díez’s extraordinary The Golden Dream, a deeply humane road movie following three Guatemalan teenagers as they make their way northwards to try to cross the Mexican border into America. It’s the debut feature from Quemada-Díez, who earned his stripes working as camera assistant on several Ken Loach pictures.

Two other films already announced that have caught our eye are concerned with characters dealing with their sexuality. The first is Bad Hair, Mariana Rondon’s intimate film about a preteen boy who’s obsessed with having his frizzy hair straightened, much to his widowed mother’s chagrin, as she fears this may be the first sign of his burgeoning homosexuality. Rarely are mother-son relationships so finely observed on screen. The other film in the programme with a queer sensibility is Hawaii, from Argentinean filmmaker Marco Berger. We’ve not caught this one yet, but reports suggest it’s an artful film with an erotic charge. Look to www.cornerhouse.org for further programme details.

These regional festivals show that there’re vital films events happening beyond the M25 citadel. All three are worth a trip.