Glasgow Film Festival reveals 2026 programme

The 22nd edition of Glasgow Film Festival is just around the corner. It’ll be the first in the festival’s history to take place without the involvement of Allison Gardner, the former head of Glasgow Film, who retired last year. While Gardner’s pithy intros and hilarious asides will be much missed, our first glance at this year’s programme, announced today, suggests this year’s festival team – headed up by new Head of Programme Paul Gallagher – has put together an eclectic lineup that’s at the same high level we’ve come to expect from Scotland’s largest film celebration.

Made in Scotland

As has been the case at GFF for the last few years, there’s a strong thread of homegrown films running through the festival. The event opens and closes with much-anticipated films exploring extraordinary true-life stories from Scotland’s recent history. James McAvoy, who took part in a lively on-stage chat at last year’s festival, will bring the curtain down with his directorial debut, California Schemin’, which tells the stranger-than-fiction tale of how Silibil N’ Brains, two young rappers from Dundee, hoodwinked the music industry into believing they were Californian hip-hop stars. Opening the festival, meanwhile, is Felipe Bustos Sierra's documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street, which tells the rousing story of how a community in Glasgow’s southside rallied together and took a stand against the British Home Office to prevent two of their neighbours from being hauled off in a deportation van during a shameful dawn raid. Bustos Sierra gave GFF one of its greatest ever festival screenings when he closed the festival in 2018 with his documentary Nae Pasaran. This opening looks set to be just as powerful.

Peter Mullan in The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford | image: Saskia Coulson

Another Scottish highlight looks to be The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, a darkly comic study of a tour guide at a dusty village visitor centre who starts to lose his sense of reality when a Game of Thrones-style TV show begins filming in the area. Peter Mullan shows off his comedy chops as the tour guide in this debut from Seán Dunn, which has its world premiere at Rotterdam before coming to GFF. In terms of world premieres, look out for the action-thriller Jailbroken, which opens GFF’s horror strand FrightFest. Director Vasily Chuprina hails from Germany, but this ingenious film, set entirely within a single prison cell, is co-produced by Scottish production company Up Helly Aa and has local acting talent like David Hayman and Shauna MacDonald in the cast. 

Films don’t come more homegrown than Welcome to G-Town, a micro-budget sci-fi horror flick about a trio of uni graduates who get embroiled in an alien conspiracy. Directed by filmmaking siblings Nathan and Ben McQuaid and Executive Produced by micro-budget specialist Graham Hughes (Death of a Vlogger), we’re told to expect the splatter excess of Peter Jackson's early films combined with the dry humour of Bill Forsyth's Scottish comedies. We’ve also heard good things about Stroma Cairns’ The Son and the Sea, a tender coming-of-age film which sees three friends travel to Scotland’s North East coast, and another world premiere is Sailm nan Daoine (Psalms of the People), Jack Archer’s documentary on Scotland’s tradition of Gaelic psalm singing.

Films from great auteurs

Last year’s GFF was decidedly lighter on films from big-name auteurs, but there’s a good selection of legendary directors with work in this year’s programme. Indie filmmaking icon Jim Jarmusch screens Father Mother Sister Brother, which won him the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival. It’s a slyly comic triptych exploring three stories about the bruising difficulties of family relationships with a knockout cast that includes Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps. Gus Van Sant is reportedly back in top form with Dead Man’s Wire, a true-crime suspense thriller set in the 1970s that riffs on many of the great films from that era (think The Sugarland Express, Network and especially Dog Day Afternoon). 

Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother courtesy of MUBI

Another film to emerge from this year’s festival circuit with fulsome praise is Rose of Nevada, an enigmatic time-travel drama set in Cornwall from the uber-talented Mark Jenkin (Bait, Enys Men); George MacKay and Callum Turner star in this unsettling study of coastal life. You’ll also find MacKay in Broken English, a dreamy fiction-doc hybrid celebrating the late, great Marianne Faithfull from Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth; the film blends conversation with the iconoclastic British singer-songwriter, covers of her songs by the likes of Beth Orton and Courtney Love, and dramatised elements featuring Tilda Swinton and the aforementioned MacKay.

More famous faces

Is there a harder-working or more consistently excellent Hollywood actor than Willem Dafoe? He leads two GFF films this year. Kent Jones’ Late Fame, a wistful look at New York’s downtown art scene starring Dafoe as an ageing postman whose obscure poetry collection, written as he was a young man, has gained appreciation decades later from younger artists. And in The Birthday Party, he plays a wealthy Greek tycoon who’s hosting a lavish shindig for his daughter on a private island. Closely behind Dafoe in the work ethic stakes is Josh O’Connor. In Rebuilding, he plays a cowboy trying to start again after he and his local community lose everything in a devastating wildfire. We see another side of Saoirse Ronan in the dark comedy Bad Apple, in which the Irish actor plays an overwhelmed primary school teacher who goes to extreme measures when dealing with her most unruly pupil. And we’re told Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough give wild performances as a couple who kidnap and chain up a young ne'er-do-well to rehabilitate him in the gloriously odd family horror Good Boy.

Andrea Riseborough, Stephen Graham, Kit Rakusen and Anson Boon in Good Boy courtesy of Signature Entertainment

After conquering the world with BRAT, Charli xcx seems to have her sights set on movies, with several projects due to come to fruition this year. One of those is Erupcja, which sees Charli play an English tourist who connects with an old friend while in Warsaw with her boyfriend. Critics have compared Erupcja’s hangout mood to Lost in Translation and Before Sunrise, which sounds good to us.

Angelina Jolie is back on our screens in Alice Winocour’s Couture, a drama set in and around ​​Paris Fashion Week, while Jude Law makes for an unlikely Vladimir Putin in Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin. And Danny Dyer is said to be excellent in the football agent thriller One Last Deal, which takes place in one location, and Dyer is the only on-screen character. “In a way, I feel like it’s my Hamlet,” said Dyer. 

Marilyn Monroe, Swedish cinema focus and site-specific screenings

Those are today’s stars, but GFF is also paying tribute to one of the great icons of Hollywood’s past: Marilyn Monroe. The festival marks the centenary of her birth with a selection of her films, from audience favourites (Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) to deeper cuts (psychological thriller Don't Bother to Knock).  

That's just a fraction of the 126 films from 44 countries screening between 25 February and 8 March, which also include a Focus on Sweden, a free morning retrospective titled Truth to Power and a couple of special, site-specific screenings, including a school prom and screening of Carrie at The Pyramid at Anderston to mark the 50th anniversary of Brian De Palma's cult classic. 

“It is an absolute honour and privilege to unveil my first Glasgow Film Festival programme,” Paul Gallagher, Head of Programme at Glasgow Film Festival, said of the 22nd edition of the festival. “Across [the festival’s] 126 features are stories of vastly differing characters, settings and ideas, but one thing connects them: they are all the result of a personal vision, uniquely brought to the screen. 

“I’m particularly pleased at the depth and variety of films in this programme that were made here in Scotland or by Scottish talent; it speaks so highly of the great filmmakers we have, and the increasing opportunities they are taking and creating for themselves. I can’t wait to showcase theirs and so many other brilliant filmmakers’ work to the greatest cinema audience in the world!”

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GFF takes place 25 Feb-8 Mar. Tickets go on sale to CineCard holders at 10am on 23 Jan, and on general public sale at 10am on Monday 26 Jan at glasgowfilm.org