Scottish Film Events: February 2022

Glasgow Film Theatre has an absolute treat for Glasgow cinephiles this month with a retrospective of the lyrical films of American director and long-time GFF favourite Patrick Wang. Included in the season is the humanistic epic A Bread Factory, a two-part comic delight that takes you inside the day-to-day workings of a ramshackle community arts centre, which is under threat when a flashier venue comes to town and eats up all the local art funding.

Open-hearted, wry and utterly skew-whiff, it’s a glorious celebration of the venues that enrich their towns by building a creative community around them – venues just like Glasgow Film Theatre, in fact. Both films screen on separate days over the weekend of 19 and 20 February, with Wang's equally essential earlier films In the Family and The Grief of Others playing later in the month.

GFT is also paying loving tribute to the late, great Peter Bogdanovich, who died 6 January, with two showings of his delightful third feature Paper Moon (19 & 22 Feb). Arguably the finest film of Bogdanovich's storied career, it sees real-life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal team up to play peripatetic con artists who are grifting their way across Kansas during the Great Depression.

If you’re in the mood for more Ryan O’Neal, look no further than Filmhouse’s Valentine's Day screening of Love Story, in which he plays an Ivy League rich kid who falls for Ali MacGraw’s more down-to-earth music student. Love Story is rarely screened today, despite it being the highest-grossing film of 1970, but five decades later, this swooning romance still has the power to leave you weeping in the aisles as the credits roll. Cinema of a romantic variety can also be found at GFT on 14 February, where Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love will be screening on 35mm along with Casablanca, 10 Things I Hate About You and Touched, a showcase of sensuous shorts by female and non-binary filmmakers.

If romance isn’t your bag, how about the apocalypse? The Skinny’s outgoing Intersections editor, Katie Goh, is hosting a nifty programme of speculative disaster movies at Summerhall in Edinburgh this month. Included in the season is Melancholia (10 Feb), Silent Running (11 Feb), Mad Max: Fury Road (17 Feb), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (18 Feb), Children of Men (19 Feb), High Life (24 Feb) and Dr Strangelove (25 Feb).