Scotland's Film Festival Scene: Vibrant but Running on Fumes
Scotland has a plentitude of film festivals but there's an increasing scarcity of funding available to support them. In a month overflowing with film events, we take the temperature on this vibrant but precarious scene
If you’re a film fan living in Scotland, you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to film festivals. Are you nuts for Japanese animation? Check out Scotland Loves Anime (1-10 Nov). A bit of a Francophile? French Film Festival UK is for you (6 Nov-12 Dec). Perhaps it’s films concerned with LGBTQ+ stories you’re after? Get yourself to SQIFF aka the Scottish Queer International Film Festival (8-12 Oct). And those are just a few of the festivals happening in the near future. Across Scotland you’ll also find brilliant festivals championing silent film (HippFest in Bo’ness), artist moving image (Alchemy in Hawick), short films (Glasgow Short Film Festival), films by women (Sea Change in Tiree), folk cinema (The Folk Film Gathering in Edinburgh) and much more. Whatever your movie taste, there’s a film event happening somewhere in this fair land for you.
One festival that could probably cater for all your needs, though, is Glasgow Film Festival. Its motto is “cinema for all” and on that it delivers. It’s the kind of festival where you can watch a Hollywood classic in the morning, discover a charming Icelandic football documentary in the afternoon, hear a member of The Lord of the Rings' fellowship discuss their illustrious career in the evening and finish the night with a gnarly horror. GFF has slowly grown to be Scotland’s biggest film festival too, surpassing the older, grander Edinburgh Film Festival in terms of audience, programme and industry event size some years ago. “I'm not a great believer you have to grow every year for growth's sake,” says GFF director Allison Gardner when I chat to her by phone, although she certainly sounds chuffed at Glasgow’s status as, in her words, the country’s “premier film festival.”
Size isn’t everything, though. Gardner reckons the festival feels just about right at the moment. “It's now big enough to attract a brilliant range of films, but small enough to still feel intimate.” Crucially, GFF is of a size where she feels she can still interact with the audience. “You know, I go to Cannes every year and it's not like I ever get to talk to [its artistic director] Thierry Frémaux,” says Gardner. “He just gets ferried hither and thither. But I hope that's not the experience the audience or industry members have with me. People can, and do, come up and talk to me at any time.”
Scotland’s film festivals come in all shapes and sizes, and there are plenty of smaller, more specialist organisations that are as ambitious as GFF in their own way. Take, for example, Take One Action, Scotland’s film festival concerned with creating positive social change. “I think what makes Take One Action unique,” says Xuanlin Tham, TOA’s programmer, “is the emphasis that we place on using film as a catalyst and as a way for bringing people together with the hopes that the collective momentum and energy [of our events] carries forward in their lives.”
While films are carefully curated at TOA, they’re only the starting point. “I think from the beginning, we have always been led by the needs of our community,” explains Tham. “So our priorities as a film festival aren’t the traditional ones like prestige or how many hundreds of tickets we sell. It's about the meaningfulness of our interactions.”
GFF celebrated a bumper year in 2024, with 34,000 attendees, but it sounds as if Gardner agrees with Tham’s sentiments on measures of success all the same. “I tried to say to funders all the time: what is really important is not just the number of people who attend, but the experience those people have,” explains Gardner. “Lots of people is good because obviously we need to work to budget and make sure we have the right amount of ticket sales, but we also have to make sure that every audience member, every filmmaker, every industry delegate, every press member has a good experience. Now, that's a big ask, because, you know, everybody's different, but we do genuinely look at it from a place of achieving excellence.”
These festivals are different in scale but what they have in common is that they welcome you in; they want to build community around films. Part of the reason why GFF feels so rooted in its home city is its connection to Glasgow Film Theatre, its main base of operation. As CEO of Glasgow Film, Gardner oversees both. She suggests the close collaboration between the various GFF and GFT teams is why both organisations are thriving. “Paul [Gallagher], who programmes GFT, is involved in the festival and suggests things and looks at stuff for us, and he knows our audience,” says Gardner. “And so the year-round audience at GFT knows that they can trust the festival. And then, in turn, the audience who comes to GFF gets introduced to the GFT.”
Many of Scotland's best festivals have similar year-round activities. French Film Festival UK, for example, continually feeds their Edinburgh audience’s appetite for French cinema with regular screenings at the Institut Français. Festival of cult cinema Weird Weekend (25-27 Oct) are building a voracious audience for truly bizarre cult movies in Glasgow at their monthly film club. And Alchemy in Hawick might be the most industrious festival in the whole UK: they’ve initiated myriad grassroots projects in their Border hometown, from school workshops to artists' residencies, turning it into an unlikely hub of filmmaking activity, much of which then features alongside international work in the annual festival.
Alison Gardner. Image: Eoin Carey.
TOA recognises the importance of fostering community outwith festival time too, so much so that they’ve recently adopted an experimental new model. They’re now a biennial festival, with smaller, regular events bridging the gap. “We realised that sometimes, especially with a really small team like ours, those relationships that you hope to establish within the various communities that you're working in can end up being in short bursts and quite extractive [using the annual festival model], even though you don't intend for them to be,” says Tham. “With this new model, we hope to turn those relationships into something much more long-term and mutually enriching.”
Arts funding in Scotland must be in rude health to support such a rich and diverse film festival landscape, you might think to yourself. But nothing could be further from the truth. That’s what’s so incredible about this scene: it seems to be endlessly creative and buoyant despite the fact Creative Scotland’s funding has remained static for years. The cracks have long been showing, however. Key venues that host these film festivals have either closed (Filmhouse in Edinburgh) or are hanging on by their fingernails (Summerhall in Edinburgh is currently seeking public donations to help cover its core costs while the CCA in Glasgow has been forced to close its doors over the winter until the new round of Creative Scotland funding). And while Edinburgh Film Festival made a phoenix-like return back in August after an expensive rescue job by Screen Scotland, some smaller festivals have quietly shut up shop or are on an extended hiatus while they assess their futures (see Document and Africa in Motion).
When I ask Gardner what’s the biggest challenge faced by film festivals, she doesn’t miss a beat: “Money. It has to be funding. In terms of our Creative Scotland RFO [Regularly Funded Organisations] funding, that has been the same since 2015, so in real terms, taking into account inflation, it's probably a 40% cut. How we've managed that is by exceeding our income targets through box-office sales and we diligently look at every budget line, you know? But there is a limit to that.”
It’s the same story with the other festivals. Richard Mowe, director of the long-running French Film Festival UK told us: “Putting together budgets in these straitened times remains a challenging and tough process. Our available funds have diminished by £10,000 over the last three years while operational costs have risen. Although some sponsors have stayed faithful to the Festival, others, due to budgetary constraints, have been unable to renew collaborations.”
Mowe also notes the importance of independent arts venues to the festival ecosystem. “With the demise of Filmhouse in Edinburgh (due to reopen in the first quarter of next year) finding available screen space is proving difficult,” he explains. “Multiplexes are reluctant (understandably) to sacrifice the money-making potential of such blockbuster releases as Wicked in favour of festivals. This also affects such ’arthouse’ sites as the Cameo in Edinburgh.”
Despite this rough funding climate, these festivals continue to take place and punch above their weight. “That phrase, 'punch above our weight', really does ring true,” says Tham. The real story is that the vibrancy of these festivals is down to the sweat and ingenuity of arts workers, many of them overworked, underpaid freelancers on short-term contracts, who go above and beyond. “Most of the people I know who are delivering incredible festivals, like SQIFF, for example, are operating with tiny teams,” Tham continues, “yet they deliver incredible festivals, prioritise access, sell out venues, all of these things. But a lot of these festivals whose external output looks amazing and up to par with some of the larger festivals in terms of ambition are really struggling. They are always based on project funding that is, by its nature, precarious. You won't know if you get it next year, which means that you can't promise your staff or your audience's longevity.” Festivals like TOA and SQIFF – and the arts freelancers who run them – have built a vibrant and exciting cultural scene, but its longevity is far from guaranteed.
It’s a precarious time for the arts but Gardner seems hopeful. “There’s so much great work out there, and I think that we need to give all kudos to Film Hub Scotland as well in terms of the work that they've been doing to connect the sector in a much more strategic way,” she says. Gardner also suggests more collaboration and resource sharing as a way forward. “I think there are lots of strategic things that we could do that would benefit both people and organisations. Is there a pool of Film Festival professionals that we can employ all year round, for example?”
What's for sure is that this vibrant scene can’t survive on the passion of its workers forever. There’s a sense of these festivals holding their breath until a more stable funding era arrives, which could emerge in 2025 when the current RFO programme is renewed and retooled. One thing audiences can do in the meantime is support these festivals. After all, Gardner reckons a large chunk of GFF’s success can be attributed to its audience. “I do think great audiences are what make film festivals,” she says, “and ours are genuinely brilliant. They're risk-takers. I think filmmakers really feel that our audiences are truly engaged with their films when they come here.” So turn up in your droves to some or all of the festivals taking place this month and throughout the year. Help them sell out screenings and keep their atmosphere buzzing. Because without continued support, they could easily disappear tomorrow.
Glasgow Film Festival returns 26 Feb - 9 Mar 2025
French Film Festival UK, Institut Français Ecosse, Edinburgh, from 6 Nov
Take One Action hosts Here, There, Everywhere, a three-part film and art series on Music & Resistance, at various Dundee venues from 19 Oct