Scottish Film Events: May 2025

The Scottish weather continues to be unreliable, but luckily, with three great film festivals coming up, you’ll be spending much of May in a cinema.

First up, we recommend you journey to the Scottish Borders for the 15th edition of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (1-4 May) in Hawick. You can explore the festival’s nine free moving image installations, get immersed in the experimental cinema programme screening at the Heart of Hawick cinema or take part in the festival’s various events, including a film quiz, an EP launch, a ceilidh and daily ‘night caps’. Highlights include the UK premiere of Kouté vwa, Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s hybrid documentary telling a coming-of-age tale amid colonial violence, and Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film, a searing work composed from film footage plundered by the Israeli military from the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut in 1982.

Next is Edinburgh’s Folk Film Gathering (2-11 May), a unique festival devoted to folk cinema. The programme blends local filmmaking with cinema from Canada, Ireland, Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Ukraine and more. Some of the films are brand new, like Gerda Stevenson's documentary Paper Portraits, telling the story of the paper-making industry in Penicuik, but much of the programme is made up of rarely-screened films about the lived experiences of communities worldwide. What makes the Folk Film Gathering so special is that all of the screenings are accompanied by some sort of live music and storytelling complementing the work.

And the third festival that should be on your radar is Falastin Film Festival (9-19 May), the Edinburgh-based grassroots event aiming to celebrate the rich cinema of Palestine while expressing solidarity with the communities that continue to be decimated by the war in Gaza. In this second edition, Falastin expands its screenings to Glasgow and offers up an eclectic selection of recent films (like Lina Soualem’s poignant documentary Bye Bye Tiberias) as well as absolute classics (such as Elia Suleiman’s tragicomic masterpiece The Time That Remains). There are also workshops, short film screenings and the festival closes with a concert in Glasgow raising cash for the Masharawi Films Fund, which helps empower filmmakers in Gaza to continue to tell their stories.

Elsewhere, Glasgow Film Theatre celebrates its 51st birthday with a month-long programme of audience favourites, with many films screening from sparkling new 4K prints or on 35mm (Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Claire Denis’s Beau Travail play on the latter format). A highlight is the chance to see Alfred Hitchcock’s giddy wrong man drama North by Northwest on 70mm (2-8 May) and a celebration of the late, great David Lynch, with four of his finest films (Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and The Straight Story) screening throughout the month.

The Lynch love continues in Edinburgh with David Lynch’s Dream Theatre at The Cameo, a year-long season of double-bills pairing Lynch features alongside a ‘Lynchspiration’ (i.e. a film that either inspired Lynch or is heavily indebted to him). Upcoming pairings include a double dose of Dune (Lynch’s and Denis Villeneuve's respective takes, 18 May), and Blue Velvet is paired with another film concerned with dangerous voyourism: Hitchcock’s Rear Window (7 Jun).