First details of Glasgow Film Festival 2025 revealed

Next year’s Glasgow Film Festival will be a big one: its 21st edition. Which means the festival is now officially all grown up. To mark this coming-of-age milestone, GFF's annual free retrospective will be dedicated to coming-of-age films from across film history. 

“This year’s retrospective films cover the highs and lows of being a young adult,” says Glasgow Film’s CEO and GFF director Allison Gardner, “and all the experiences that go with coming-of-age.” The retrospective, titled 'Our Time is Now: Coming of Age', features a couple of Scottish high-school classics – ​​Gregory’s Girl and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – but the rest of the programme is an eclectic one, mixing drama, comedy, crime and horror from all over the world. Interestingly, many of the films are debuts.

Take, for example, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the oldest film in the lineup and the first feature from future Oscar-winner Elia Kazan. With charm and wit, this 1945 film follows the struggles of a down-on-its-luck Irish-American family in the early 20th century, as seen through the eyes of its teen daughter. Released ten years later was masterpiece Pather Panchali from Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray (also making his debut). It’s another study of an impoverished family, which Ray explores with warm humour, visual poetry and deep humanity.

Amy Heckerling’s debut Fast Times at Ridgemont High is among the best of the raunchy teen comedies that ruled 80s American cinema and is notable for alerting the world to the talents of its young cast, who include Sean Penn, Phoebe Cates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards and Nicolas Cage. John Singleton’s debut Boyz n the Hood, a devastating drama following a group of Black teens growing up amid the street violence of South Central LA, is one of the great teen films of the 90s, and all the more remarkable for Singleton being only 23 when he made it. And for a no-hold-barred glimpse of teenage life in Thatcher’s Britain, check out Shane Meadows’ extraordinary This is England, which centres on an impressionable adolescent who joins a crew of skinheads in 1983.

The programme is rounded out by three more recent teen movies – also debuts. Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s 2015 drama Mustang, which follows five sisters living under their family’s strict rules in Türkiye; Julia Ducournau’s gnarly body horror Raw, from 2016, in which a young woman who’s grown up vegetarian gets her first taste of meat, which lets loose some repressed desires; and Greta Gerwig’s much-loved 2017 comedy Lady Bird. 

All screenings will take place at GFT at 10.30am, and best of all these screenings are completely free, opening up the festival to everyone. “The retrospective screenings are an essential part of Glasgow Film Festival as they offer all audiences, no matter their circumstances, the chance to watch films for free, and to see films as they are best enjoyed: on a big screen with fellow film fans around you,” says Gardner.  

GFF takes place 16 Feb to 9 Mar 2025; The full programme is announced 21 Jan 2025