Glasgow Film Festival 2023: First details revealed
Lee Grant's documentaries will be celebrated at Glasgow Film Festival 2023; there's also a focus on Spain, and a retrospective celebrating women taking charge
In the wake of the collapse of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, there’s more positive news coming from the other end of the M8. Glasgow Film Festival have today revealed a few elements planned for their 2023 edition, including an essential-looking retrospective celebrating the films of Lee Grant.
Grant has one of the more fascinating careers in Hollywood. After being Oscar-nominated for her big break in William Wyler’s Detective Story (1951), she then spent 12 years blacklisted from Hollywood after being embroiled in the McCarthy-era anti-Communist witch hunt. She emerged from that injustice to win an Oscar for her performance in Shampoo and star in other hit films like In the Heat of the Night, Valley of the Dolls, and The Landlord. Then, in the 1980s, she emerged as one of America’s great documentarians.
It's this part of Grant’s career that GFF will celebrate in a strand titled Looking for America: The Films of Lee Grant. Her extraordinary, Oscar-winning 1986 documentary Down and Out in America, concerned with US homelessness in the Reagan-era, screens alongside four more of her films. Battered, What Sex Am I?, When Women Kill and The Willmar 8 all play in GFF's retrospective.
We’ve also been informed that Spain will be the country of focus at Glasgow Film Festival 2023. Social drama On The Fringe, starring Penélope Cruz and Luis Tosar, true-life tale Prison 77 and Lullaby, a film championed by Pedro Almodóvar as ‘undoubtedly the best debut in Spanish cinema for years’, are all due to screen.
GFF’s main retrospective is also back, offering daily morning screenings of classic films throughout the festival. This year’s event is titled In the Driving Seat and will showcase “films where women take charge of their lives, setting off into the unknown seeking adventure, freedom and self-discovery". Ten films screen in all, including It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert as a runaway heiress, The Piano with Holly Hunter as an intrepid Scotswoman, Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn as an incognito princess, and Bonnie and Clyde with Faye Dunaway as a Depression-era bank robber.
On a more sombre note, 2023 will be the final year with Allan Hunter as GFF’s co-director. “It has been one of the great privileges of my career to be part of the Glasgow Film Festival for the past 15 years,” says Hunter. “It has been humbling to witness how the Festival has grown and to discover just how much it is cherished by our incredible audiences.
"Everything has its season and it is time to move along. Time for someone with fresh ideas and energy to assist the Festival on the next stage of its journey. I will miss wonderful colleagues and the best audiences in the world but I look forward to watching the Festival continue to grow and prosper.”
Hunter will be missed, not least for his passionate and erudite introductions, which means you should be doubly incentivised to make it along to those retrospective screenings. The chance to hear him rhapsodise on films like It Happened One Night and Bonnie and Clyde should not be missed.
Glasgow Film Festival runs 1-12 March 2023. More info at glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-film-festival