Scotland on Screen: Review of 2024

Allison Gardner – CEO, Glasgow Film; Director, Glasgow Film Festival

Cinema adjacent highlight of 2024?
I'd have to say Viggo Mortensen attending the festival with The Dead Don’t Hurt. It was a great screening and a very special moment. I was very honoured to present our inaugural ‘Cinema City’ award to him at GFF24. 

Favourite film of 2024?
I think Poor Things was exceptional, and we had a great preview with Alasdair Gray’s son introducing the screening at GFT, which made it very special.

What are you looking forward to in 2025?
GFF25, my last one before I retire in October. I love the audiences, filmmakers and industry colleagues and I will miss it hugely, so let’s make it a good one!

GFF runs 26 Feb-9 Mar glasgowfilm.org/glasgow-film-festival-2024-closes

Paul Ridd – CEO and Festival Director, Edinburgh International Film Festival

Cinema adjacent highlight of 2024?
Has to be a tie between the brilliantly wild energy of the packed-out UK premiere of Coralie Fargeat's The Substance as the last night of our Midnight Madness at EIFF, and the Opening Night of GFF with Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding – Allison Gardner was a class act host for one of the best films of the year. 

Favourite film of 2024?
No film moved me as much this year as Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw – fantastic performances, cinematography and production design. I was struck by the intricacy of its construction and doomy grandeur. Loved the symbolically loaded use of wrestling, the ‘curse’ red herring and the subtle descent into nightmare. A major film. 

What are you looking forward to in 2025? 
I have adored the experience of my first year as CEO and Festival Director at EIFF. Working with such a brilliant group of people to put together our Festival has been a total joy. I'm looking forward to my second year and all its possibilities. Bring it on! 

EIFF returns in 2025 edfilmfest.org

Matt Lloyd – Director, Glasgow Short Film Festival

Cinema adjacent highlight of 2024?
I enjoyed desecrating Ingmar Bergman’s childhood cinema with a rare dual 16mm projection of Nick Zedd’s Whoregasm.

Favourite film of 2024?
Two shorts have bookended this year for me. Firstly, the Haitian film Dreams Like Paper Boats by Samuel Suffren, which tenderly yet unsentimentally portrays a father-daughter relationship long after the mother has left for a better life in America. In crisp monochrome with dashes of surrealism, it seemed to capture the spirit of Bill Douglas’s Trilogy. And in the last month, I’ve caught the latest work by UK-based Iranian artist Maryam Tafakory, Razeh-del. It’s her most effective fusion yet of textures, archive film and text on screen, combining in a timely recounting of the history of Zan, Iran’s first women’s newspaper. Maryam has made a significant professional sacrifice this year in publicly withdrawing her work from several international festivals that have stifled criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and her fearless commitment to liberation for all is etched into every frame of this monumental work. 

Special mention to two long films: La Chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher) and The Wild Robot (dir. Chris Sanders)

What are you looking forward to in 2025? 
Making jam and riding my bike.

GSFF runs 19-23 Mar glasgowshort.org

Alison Strauss – Director, HippFest

Cinema adjacent highlight of 2024?
Hands down this was the screening of The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1933) for the Opening Night of HippFest 2024 in March at the Hippodrome Cinema, with live music accompaniment by Inge Thomson and Catriona Macdonald, both from Shetland themselves. The film was directed by Jenny Gilbertson who moved from Glasgow to Shetland and fell in love with the island, and with her leading man! It’s an extraordinarily beautiful film and deserves to be more widely seen. The new music commission was the realisation of a long-held ambition of mine, over seven years in gestation, and the cherry on the cake was that our screening was introduced by Janet McBain, founding curator of the Scottish Screen Archive who unearthed Gilbertson’s film in a henhouse back in the 70s.

Favourite film of 2024?
Àma Gloria (dir. Marie Amachoukeli) – a completely immersive portrait of love and variations of familial bonds and how they are impacted by socio/political economics, featuring an unforgettable performance by six-year-old Louise Mauroy-Panzani as Cléo.

What are you looking forward to in 2025? 
Memoir of a Snail (dir. Adam Elliot). I loved Elliot’s last feature, the stop motion animation for grown-ups, Mary and Max, which came out 15 years ago. Finally, this new feature will be released here in February and I can’t wait. It’s billed as a 'tragicomedy' and is apparently loosely inspired by Elliot's own life – following the life of a lonely misfit called Grace. I’m anticipating laughs, tears and lovably dark, detailed animation.

HippFest runs 19-23 Mar hippodromecinema.co.uk/hippfest

The Rugged Island, HippFest 2024. Image courtesy of HippFest.

Megan Mitchell and Sean Welsh – Programmers and Producers, Matchbox Cine and Weird Weekend

Cinema adjacent highlight of 2024?
We were most proud of our one-two Weird Weekend screenings of Louise Weard's four-and-a-half hour Castration Movie Pt 1 and the new, hour-long film we commissioned from Louise for our annual UNSEE event. We brought Louise over for the festival, the audience was incredible and the atmosphere was fantastic.

Favourite film of 2024?
Louise Weard's UNSEE, "the most important trans film of the year" according to Vera Drew, director of The People's Joker. It was a mystery to the audience before it screened and was intended to be shown only once, in the hour before the clocks go back. To have people arriving to the already packed festival at 1am just to see it was heart-warming and it was great to hear and read all the responses afterwards. Louise made a transgressive, hilarious, heart-breaking film that we're definitely a little sad is now lost forever.

What are you looking forward to in 2025? 
A sleep (and releasing The People's Joker to UK cinemas).

Weird Weekend returns in 2025 makeitweird.co.uk

Rachel Hamada – Director, Take One Action

Cinema adjacent highlight of 2024?
One of the screenings I’m proudest of this year is our Making Masculinities short film programme and discussion, which was curated in partnership with Pillow Talk and SQIFF at Glasgow's CCA. At a time when misogyny and transphobia seem to be rife, we wanted to present a safe holding space to collectively, openly and even playfully contemplate and explore masculinities in all their guises.

Favourite film of 2024?
My pick for 2024 is a late entry, Naqqash Khalid’s In Camera. It’s exciting to see such original, confident work from a young writer-director who’s not scared to play with form and to take on the cognitive dissonance of contemporary British life. Khalid is a director who is clearly up for interrogating unspoken systems and conventions and that’s very much up our street!

What are you looking forward to in 2025? 
In 2025, I’m beyond excited for our Real Utopias film festival, which will tour Glasgow, Inverness, Aberdeen and Dundee after kicking off in Edinburgh on 18 September. We’re currently crowdfunding to ensure we can work on a really ambitious programme, much of which will be co-designed with grassroots groups in and around those cities. The plan is to collectively explore through film and activities ways of building better futures in the here and now.

Take One Action takeoneaction.org.uk

Milo Clenshaw – Producer, Alchemy Film & Arts

Cinema adjacent highlight of 2024?
This is an easy answer for me; by far the most electric screening room I've been in this year, and the one I've been most proud to be a part of, was Alchemy's Artist in Focus screening of work by Palestinian filmmaker Noor Abed. The films themselves are powerful, but it was the Q&A that followed which made the event feel especially magic.

Favourite film of 2024?
It's impossible to choose only one! I'm really glad that I managed to catch We Are Parable's Glasgow premiere of Banel & Adama (dir. Ramata-Toulaye Sy) – it's a film that's stayed with me all year.

What are you looking forward to in 2025? 
We're lucky to get to work with some great artists through Alchemy's residencies programme, and a lot of those projects will have their premiere at next year's Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. I'm looking forward to seeing the audience's response to new work by Luke Fowler, Corin Sworn, Mark Lyken, Francisco Llinás Casas, Maybelle Peters and Miwa Nagato-Apthorp.

Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival runs 1-4 May alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival

Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival – Focus on Noor Abed. Image: Sanne Gault.

Paul Gallagher – Programme Manager, Glasgow Film

Cinema adjacent highlight of 2024?
I’m going to cheat and mention a whole series of screenings I programmed at GFT this year, to mark the cinema’s 50th Anniversary. We celebrated the occasion by playing 14 films through the month of May that have struck a chord with GFT audiences over the past 50 years, including Cinema Paradiso, City of God, In the Mood for Love, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Aftersun. The response from audiences was amazing, and the buzz and sense of love for cinema (and for GFT) in all these screenings was really very special.

Favourite film of 2024?
Perfect Days by Wim Wenders – a patient, thoughtful, wise and beautiful film which is a very effective balm for our troubled times!

What are you looking forward to in 2025? 
The Brutalist by Brady Corbet. I’ve already seen this, and I can’t wait to bring it to GFT audiences in January and February. It’s an awesome piece of filmmaking, in the truest sense of the word, made for the big screen and a truly epic viewing experience – with a built-in intermission that just enhances the feeling of it being an event. Look out for details of 70mm screenings at GFT in the new year.

glasgowfilm.org

Richard Mowe – Director, French Film Festival UK

Cinema adjacent highlight of 2024?
Jim’s Story, the ninth feature from Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu, adapted from a novel by Pierric Bailly. They were in London in November as part of this year’s French Film Festival UK with the premiere, and it was a memorable occasion to be in the same room as those fraternal filmmaking brothers, Arnaud (58) and Jean-Marie (59), who have been making their idiosyncratic range of work for 25 years. 

Favourite film of 2024?
Emilia Pérez (dir. Jacques Audiard). On the surface, it sounds like one of the most unlikely of premises for a film by the French auteur behind A Prophet and Dheepan. It's a Spanish-language musical themed around a Mexican drug cartel and featuring a dealer who wants to escape the whole scene because he is finding his true self as a woman. Yet Audiard pulls it off with a frenetic energy that bludgeons the viewer into submission, not least because of the high voltage score and dazzling technical trickery (it was all shot in a studio). Pedro Almodóvar must be devastated he did not stumble across the story first because it would have been a perfect fit.

What are you looking forward to in 2025? 
Can’t wait to see Timothée Chalamet in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. From what I’ve seen of the trailer he looks pretty convincing as Bob Dylan, surrounded by the likes of Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and so many more. I just hope he can match the look with the sound.

French Film Festival UK returns in 2025 frenchfilmfestival.org.uk