Glasgow Film Festival reveals first titles for 2027

It’s around this time of year that Scottish cinephiles start to get excited, because the Glasgow Film Festival is only a few months away. The 2027 edition takes place 24 February to 7 March, and today we get our first taste of the programme with the announcement of the festival’s much-loved free morning retrospective. Audiences will certainly be woken up at the upcoming edition, because the 2027 theme is Somebody’s Watching: Surveillance, Voyeurism and Performance, and the lineup is made up of dark classics on the subject of watching. 

“Cinema is by its nature a voyeuristic medium,” says Paul Gallagher, Head of Programme for Glasgow Film, “and there is a rich history of filmmakers wrestling with that uneasy reality. In our current moment we are all increasingly aware of being watched, both with and without our consent, so it feels like a perfect time to ask what cinema has taught us about the perils and pleasures of looking and being looked at.” 

Classics from Soderbergh, Antonioni and Linklater

A Scanner Darkly courtesy of Park Circus and Warner Bros.

Sickos, you’ll be in heaven. Highlights of the retrospective include Steven Soderbergh’s landmark indie Sex, Lies, and Videotape, where a group of hot people (Peter Gallagher, Andie MacDowell, Laura San Giacomo and James Spader) muse about sex. If that doesn’t get you hot enough under the collar for breakfast time, there’s also Michelangelo Antonioni’s sexy arthouse classic Blow-Up, a thriller all about looking. It follows a photographer (David Hemmings) in Swinging London who thinks he’s inadvertently caught a murder on his camera. Also be sure to catch Youssef Chahine’s 1958 masterpiece Cairo Station. It's a blend of comedy, film noir and musical centred on a dark plot about a disabled news vendor whose repressed sexual desires turn hideously violent. 

Also announced so far are two great films about surveillance: Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, starring John Hurt, and Richard Linklater’s animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, starring a rotoscoped Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr. More films will join this tantalising lineup in due course.

Country Focus: Canada

The Stunt Driver courtesy of Signature Entertainment

Every year GFF also hosts a Country Focus showcasing a particularly exciting film scene from somewhere in the world, and next year it’ll be the turn of Canada. GFF previously celebrated Canadian cinema back in 2017, and this return to Maple Country is titled Great Takes: Canadian Cinema. One major highlight will be the UK premiere of Leah Nelson's animated drama Tangles, based on Sarah Leavitt's bruising graphic novel Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother and Me. Nelson's film had critics raving when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year, with Variety’s Guy Lodge calling it "candid, funny and incrementally heartbreaking". Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson and Bryan Cranston lead the voice cast, with smaller roles from Seth Rogen, Beanie Feldstein and Sarah Silverman.

Also look out for The Stunt Driver, a comedy-drama starring Jay Baruchel as real-life daredevil Ken Carter (basically Canada's Evel Knievel), who attempts a seemingly impossible rocket-car jump across the St. Lawrence River; L'autre, a French Canadian thriller centred on a cancer patient recovering from surgery that's said to have "a touch of Cronenbergian body-horror about it"; and A Safe Distance, Gloria Mercer’s debut crime thriller about a woman who befriends a pair of notorious fugitives after being abandoned by her boyfriend in the forest.

“From world-class animation to bold drama to genre-pushing documentaries, these Canadian filmmakers are at the top of their game, and I can't wait for Glasgow audiences to discover them,” says Gallagher. 

GFF adds Renfrew St Omniplex as venue

GFF 2027 will also see the festival include a new city centre venue. The Omniplex Cinemas on Renfrew Street, which was formerly Cineworld, is just along the road from GFF’s central hub, the GFT. Next year it’ll be partnering with GFF, and the festival will take over an entire floor of its huge Renfrew Street venue, which means four more screens for the festival to play with.  

The full GFF 2027 programme will be announced on 20 Jan, with press and industry accreditation open from 2 December. More details at glasgowfilmfest.org/home