Glasgow Film Festival reveals first films for 2026

Winter is slowly but surely approaching, and with those cold, dark months drawing in, we’re already getting excited for the promise of some great films at the end of February with the return of Glasgow Film Festival. The GFF team are currently putting the programme together, to be revealed in the new year, but before then they’ve given us a taste of what to expect by announcing their Country Focus for 2026 and some of the titles for their much-loved Retrospective Programme.

For the uninitiated, GFF’s Retrospective is a lineup of classic movies that screen every morning of the festival at 10.30am. Tickets are free, and Glasgow film fans queue around the block to see them. The theme for the 2026 retrospective is Truth to Power, and it will include “ten classics from the 1930s to the present day that stand as cinematic statements of resistance, or feature characters that rise against the machines of power.” 

Truth to Power: Dr Strangelove, The Battle of Algiers & more

GFF have shared six of the titles planned so far. With the world constantly feeling like it’s on the brink of destruction, it will be instructive to revisit Stanley Kubrick's blistering 1964 satire Dr Strangelove, where military blunders push the world towards nuclear annihilation. For something more uplifting, there’s a fierce Julia Roberts taking on industrial polluters in Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich, from 2000. And GFF are showing one of the greatest films about resistance: The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 docudrama detailing Algeria's battle for independence from the French government. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called it “one of the best movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made.”

Add to this trio Jim Sheridan’s 1993 film In the Name of the Father, in which Daniel Day-Lewis plays an Irishman wrongfully convicted of an IRA bombing in London; Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film Selma, which dramatises the turning point in US civil rights history when Martin Luther King Jr. led marches in Selma, Alabama, demanding voting rights for Black people in the South; and for its 50th anniversary, the wonderful political thriller All the President’s Men, in which Dustin Hoffman and the late Robert Redford play the reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, whose investigations exposed the Watergate scandal.

GFF's new Head of Programme Paul Gallagher explains that Redford, who died back in September, was the starting point for this lineup. “The idea for this year’s retrospective began as I reflected on [his] legacy and influence,” Gallagher says in GFF’s release. “With his classic All the President’s Men serving as a starting point, ‘Truth to Power’ focuses on filmmakers who have taken on daunting targets – power, corruption and injustice – and created all-time classic films in the process; films that are not only hugely entertaining but retain sharp relevance to this day.”

Still from Live a Little. Image: Mattias Pollak

Swedish cinema focus for GFF 2026

It was also announced today that GFF26’s Country Focus will be Sweden. The hand-picked selection, subtitled Take a Chance on Me, will give a snapshot of the contemporary cinema being made in the Scandinavian nation. Expect political satire (Eagles of the Republic is about an adored Egyptian actor who takes the lead role in a major government propaganda film), slick horror (The Home, where strange events unfold after the protagonist takes his mother into a care facility for dementia) and sci-fi (Egghead Republic, set in an alternative reality where the Cold War didn’t end). There's also Live a Little, which follows a young woman’s exploration of her boundaries on an interrailing trip after she wakes up in a man’s bed with no memory of the night before; and Redoubt, a drama that concerns a farmhand who builds a fortress in his home during the Cold War; GFF call the film, which stars the great French actor Denis Lavant, "unique and visually stunning".

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The full Glasgow Film Festival 2026 programme will be announced on 21 Jan