Scottish Film Events: February 2026

Scotland’s biggest film celebration, Glasgow Film Festival, kicks off on 25 February with Felipe Bustos Sierra's Everybody to Kenmure Street. You can read more about that film in our February issue, and you’ll find ten highlights from that 12-day festival, including the new films from Jim Jarmusch, Mark Jenkin and Gus Van Sant, elsewhere on this website. 

Many of GFF’s screenings take place at Glasgow Film Theatre, but before the festival takeover, that cinema will be hosting two unmissable queer movies. First, seek out an extremely rare screening of Stephen Winter’s Chocolate Babies, a hidden gem of the New Queer Cinema movement. It’s a smart, exuberant and confrontational portrait of a group of AIDS activists, all queer people of colour, who are causing a ruckus and calling out hypocrisy in 90s New York. And second, Tzeli Hadjidimitriou's doc Lesvia, which takes audiences to the Greek island of Lesvos, which for 40 years has been home to a flourishing queer community that’s often been in conflict with the local residents. Hadjidimitriou, who is both a lesbian and a native of Lesvos, finds herself in the middle of these tensions.

You’ve all heard of Valentine’s Day, but what about Galentine’s Day? For those uninitiated, it’s a day celebrating female friendship that was invented by Leslie Knope, Amy Poehler's character on beloved US sitcom Parks and Recreation. Filmhouse will be celebrating both holidays this month with three heart-soaring romance films (Casablanca, Ninotchka and Wild at Heart) and three ride-or-die female friendship flicks (Thelma & Louise, Steel Magnolias and The First Wives Club). 

Filmhouse will also be paying tribute to the late, great Béla Tarr, who died earlier this year. The Hungarian filmmaker visited the Edinburgh cinema several times over the years, most recently for the 2011 Edinburgh Film Festival with his final film, The Turin Horse. That desolate masterpiece screens in Filmhouse’s programme alongside Damnation, Werckmeister Harmonies, The Man from London and Sátántangó; throw away your watch before entering the latter, which has a runtime of seven hours and twelve minutes. 

After a New Year hiatus, the crackerjack film collective Leith Kino returns to Leith Depot with an eclectic trio of screenings. First up, Jeanne Moreau plays a widowed bride on the hunt for five men who wronged her in François Truffaut’s lyrical revenge movie The Bride Wore Black (8 Feb). They have an alternative Valentine’s Day screening in mind with Tod Browning’s tale of betrayal and revenge, Freaks (14 Feb), although those of a romantic inclination can still root for Hans and Frieda. Their final screening of the month is a wild slice of so-bad-it’s-good B-movie madness, Miami Connection (22 Feb).