The Best Film Events in Scotland in May

The big screen movie happenings you should make time for this May, from several Hirokazu Kore-eda retrospectives to The Skinny's very own short film programme celebrating Scottish filmmaking talent

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 30 Apr 2019
  • The Lost Boys

1. Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival


Ceremony

Fans of avant-garde cinema should look towards Hawick this month as Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival returns to the Scottish Borders town. As ever there's a compelling line-up of experimental film and artists' moving image works, taking in features, shorts and site-specific installations. Among the highlights is the UK festival premiere of Phil Collins' Friedrich Engels film Ceremony, which is described as both a "documentary road movie and social-activist pamphlet".

Elsewhere, Stephen Broomer brings found footage fantasia Tondal's Vision, which reworks Italian film L'Inferno, and there are three tantalising retrospective programmes featuring artists who work primarily on film: Esther Urlus, Barbara Meter and Deborah S. Phillips.

2-7 May, The Heart of Hawick – more info here

2. Hirokazu Kore-eda: CineMaster


I Wish

The great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is celebrated throughout Scotland in May and June, with retrospectives happening at Filmhouse (lineup here) and Cameo (lineup here) in Edinburgh, while Glasgow Film Theatre is crowning him their latest CineMaster. Six of his films are included in the CineMasters programme, including his most recent – the Palme d'Or winner Shoplifters – and masterpieces like Still Walking, which centres on a family that’s reunited on the anniversary of its eldest son’s death, and I Wish, following two brothers as they try to reconnect their divorced parents.

If you're interested in seeing Kore-eda's first narrative feature film Maborosi, it's screening at both Filmhouse and Cameo, and the sensitivity, humanity and beauty that he would master in later works like Nobody Knows and Like Father, Like Son is evident from this debut.

7-28 May, GFT – more info here

3. An Evening with Peter Strickland


In Fabric

Peter Strickland is one of the most interesting British filmmakers working today and his latest, In Fabric, sounds like a hoot. It's described as a creepy couture horror paying homage to the classic giallo films of the 1970s, and Strickland is bringing the film to Filmhouse ahead of its UK release for a special Q&A after the film, and to introduce a screening of one of his chief inspirations, Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls. You can also find Strickland introducing In Fabric at Glasgow Film Theatre on 31 May (info here).

1 Jun, Filmhouse, Edinburgh – more info here

4. CineSkinny on Tour


Salt and Sauce

Shameless self-promotion alert! After a huge response to our callout for Scottish filmmakers to submit their short films to our inaugural CineSkinny on Tour, we've come up with a nifty programme of docs, music videos and narrative works that we're taking on tour to two of our favourite Scottish venues: Summerhall in Edinburgh and CCA, Glasgow.

Expect films about teen motorbike racers, horrific haircuts, turncoat rodents, existential line-drawings, lanky clowns, wannabe bullfighters, the nightmare that is the school playground and a quarter-life crisis down your local chip shop. Tickets are free; grab them while you still can.

8 May, Summerhall Red Lecture Theatre, Edinburgh – more info here; 22 May, CCA, Glasgow – more info here

5. Dundead

Gorehounds, to Dundee! Dundead has risen again with another lineup of horror films blending new titles with bonafide classics. Of the former, there's Zac Efron as charismatic serial killer Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile; post-WWII set shocker Werewolf, in which a motley crew of Polish children who've escaped the evils of the Nazis have to fight for survival against beasts that are circling their makeshift orphanage in the woods; and Knife + Heart, a stylish giallo riff centred on the production of a gay porn movie where the cast and crew are being picked off by a kinky killer.


Knife + Heart

Among the classics coming to Dundead, meanwhile, are Don Coscarelli's eccentric horror Phantasm, in which a group of teens discover something creepy going on at their local mortuary; David Cronenberg's self-reflexive and sorely underrated eXistenZ, a razor sharp and darkly funny examination of the possible future of virtual-reality games; and found-footage horror phenomenon The Blair Witch Project, which is screening on 35mm.

2-5 May, DCA, Dundee – more info here

6. GFT turns 80


Booksmart

Glasgow Film Theatre may be reaching its ninth decade as a cinema, but it remains as lively as ever. This month it'll be celebrating its landmark 80 Years of Cinema with a weekend of free screenings, and the lineup planned is as diverse as the regular schedule served up at the cinema on a monthly basis. First up is a preview of Booksmart, the upcoming directorial debut from actor Olivia Wilde – it's reportedly a rambunctious laugh riot. There's also David Lynch's thrillingly inexplicable neo-noir Mulholland Drive and fantasy classic The Wizard of Oz, the latter was released the same year the cinema opened (as the Cosmo) in 1939. The four-day celebrations come to an end with Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning classic Cinema Paradiso, one of the great love-letters to cinema and the magic of celluloid. Screenings are free – tickets here.

9-12 May, GFT – more info here

7. Craig Hill: House Guest


What's Up, Doc?

Stand-up comic Craig Hill is Filmhouse's latest house guest, and we've got to say, his lineup is kind of all over the place. It includes knockout Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker spoof Airplane!, smart Robert Zemeckis sci-fi Contact, Danny Boyle's saccharine rags-to-riches fairy tale Slumdog Millionaire, animated adventure fantasy Up, and Peter Bogdanovich's zesty screwball comedy update What's Up, Doc?

It's a bizarre lineup that suggests Hill just scanned across his DVD collection and picked films at random, but we're not complaining at the chance to see What's Up, Doc? and Airplane! – two of the funniest films ever made – up on the big screen, and Hill will introduce both. (Also, who's up for a film festival consisting of only films with punctuation in the title?)

13 May-12 Jun, Filmhouse – more info here

8. Sunset on 35mm

Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes knocked filmgoers sideways with his visceral Holocaust picture Son of Saul. His latest, Sunset, a scathing look at old-world Europe, is similarly stylish and was shot on 35mm. So dedicated to celluloid is Nemes that he'll be taking a print of Sunset on a trip around the UK. The tour includes two stops in Scotland: 11 May at Edinburgh Filmhouse (more info here) and 12 May at GFT (more info here), with each 35mm screening followed by a Q&A. Fellow celluloid heads, let's sell out these screenings!

9. Uncanny Valley: The Lost Boys on 35mm

Talking of the lost art of celluloid projection, the brilliant Uncanny Valley has a doozy of a late-night 35mm screening coming up: Joel Schumacher's stylish vampire flick The Lost Boys, which follows a mother (Dianne Wiest) and her two sons (Corey Haim and Jason Patric), who've moved to a quaint seaside town that happens to be being terrorised by a group of teen bloodsuckers led by Kiefer Sutherland.

31 May, Filmhouse – more info here

10. Thunder Road plus Q&A

We loved Jim Cummings’ short film Thunder Road, in which a cop's eulogy at his late mother's funeral goes off the rails thanks to an intense rendition of the eponymous Bruce Springsteen song. This feature sees Cummings expand on this brilliant short to create an offbeat tale of a lawman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and word is it's a humanist gem. This preview at GFT will include a Q&A post-film with Cummings himself.

17 May, GFT – more info here