Scotland on Screen: 2025 in review
We survey some of our favourite Scottish film festivals and programmers to hear their cinema highlights of 2025 and get a taste of what they're cooking up for Scottish cinemas in 2026
Paul Gallagher – Head of Programme for Glasgow Film
Cinema-adjacent highlight of 2025?
I hosted a big premiere with Hollywood legends Jessica Lange and Ed Harris as part of GFF this year, for a screening of their new adaptation of Long Day’s Journey into Night. That was definitely one of those ‘pinch me’ moments in my working life; getting to spend a bit of time meeting and talking to them about their years of working in Hollywood was a real treat. The screening itself was brilliant, thanks to the feeling of being in an absolutely buzzing, sold-out GFT1 audience, which is pretty unbeatable.
Favourite film of 2025
Sentimental Value by Joachim Trier. It is Trier’s best film yet, I think, in terms of the maturity of the writing, his deft handling of layers of storytelling and the exceptional performances he gets from the whole cast.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
Glasgow Film Festival 2026 – it will be my first edition as Head of Programme, and it’s going to be a good one. We’re at the point right now where there is still so much work to do to ensure it all happens, but what I am loving is putting the pieces together and gradually getting a sense of what the big picture of GFF26 is going to look like; from what I can see, there is a lot to start getting excited about.
GFF, 25 Feb-8 Mar, glasgowfilmfest.org
Rod White – Director of Programming, Filmhouse
Cinema-adjacent highlight of 2025?
Hosting the lovely Tim Key for two Q&As for The Ballad of Wallis Island back in August. After the first sold-out event, he suggested he’d be up for a second – as were we!
Favourite film of 2025?
It’s not released until next year, but Oliver Laxe’s Sirât is the best film I’ve seen this year. You never know, it might just be screening at Filmhouse from 27 February...
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
The first anniversary party (27 Jun) to mark Filmhouse’s triumphant ‘phoenix from the ashes' return to becoming, once again, the essential Edinburgh cinema!
David Nixon – Head of Cinema, DCA
What was your favourite film event/screening of 2025?
Our flagship film festivals – Discovery and Dundead – which sit at complete opposite ends of DCA's programme spectrum but equally continue to deliver such meaningful events every year. As part of Dundead Halloween, we commissioned musicians Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman to create and perform a new live score for The Phantom of the Opera (1925) to celebrate its centenary – the result was magical! The contrast between the electronic music and the 100-year-old silent film was stunning, and we were proud to tour it at partner cinemas across Scotland.
Welcoming thousands of school pupils and families into the cinema, some for the very first time, to watch the best family films from around the world during Discovery Film Festival was also a beautiful thing. A personal highlight was Czech animation Living Large, which we’re distributing to cinemas in the coming months.
Favourite film of 2025?
Nickel Boys. Despite it coming out right at the very start of 2025, RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel stayed with me more than any other film this year. Difficult subject matter told through refreshingly innovative filmmaking.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
I can’t wait to bring California Schemin’ home to Dundee and share it with our audiences. This is James McAvoy’s directorial debut, which tells the true story of two young Dundonians who achieved a record deal and fame in the early 2000s by pretending to be American rappers. I saw it at Toronto International Film Festival and can confirm it is a wild ride from start to finish.
Paul Ridd – CEO and Festival Director, Edinburgh International Film Festival
Cinema-adjacent highlight of 2025?
I am proud of all the filmmakers who competed in our main competitions at EIFF 2025. There is something truly special about all those world premiere screenings during the Festival and being there at the beginning of a film's journey. But witnessing Abdolreza Kahani, a true maverick, win the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence on our Closing Night this year with his powerful film Mortician, was a gorgeous moment. Kahani's humane, arresting and highly resourceful films defy all apparent constraints on budget, style and independent voice. They are, quite simply, a reason to keep believing in cinema and its limitless potential.
Favourite film of 2025?
Canadian director Sophy Romvari's debut feature Blue Heron is a total knockout, a film which combines a vivid and haunting evocation of childhood with playful metafictional flourishes. These elements finally come together in an ending that is simply devastating and cathartic. I cannot think of a film which moved and stirred me more this year. Romvari's filmmaking voice, its clarity and unflinching honesty, that's what we're all looking for, isn't it? I felt the same way about Laura Carreira and On Falling last year.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
Two editions of EIFF in, and I am loving working with such a brilliant team of people to deliver a top-notch festival. Mark our new dates – 13-19 August – in your calendars, people! I cannot wait for round three. I am also super excited to see what our friends at Glasgow Film Festival deliver in the first months of 2026. There are some big shoes to fill there, obviously, with the departure of the legendary Allison Gardner, but I am confident that the new team will rise to the challenge. Bring it on!
EIFF, 13-19 Aug edfilmfest.org
Alison Strauss – Director, HippFest
Cinema-adjacent highlight of 2025?
The HippFest Opening Night screening of With Reindeer and Sled in Inka Länta’s Winterland (1926, dir. Erik Bergström) was extraordinary. It’s a stunning documentary-drama hybrid, about a family of Sámi reindeer herders. We partnered with Tromsø International Film Festival to bring over four exceptional musicians to perform, including a Sámi-Finnish joik/electronic musician. The photography and storytelling are awe-inspiring, and combined with the music, it was unforgettable. A little bit of Glastonbury in Bo’ness!
Favourite film of 2025?
I Swear. It felt properly and authentically Scottish but without being swallowed up by well-worn tropes of desperation and hopelessness. The performances by Robert Aramayo and Ellis Watson blew me away, but big shout-out to our very own Hippodrome Cinema and Front of House colleague Kieran, who appeared in the sequence when young John takes his girlfriend to see Tootsie. It was such a thrill to be in the sold-out Hippodrome for a screening and see our cinema on the big screen – a meta moment that made my year.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
We’ve been running hugely popular chocolate taste-along screenings for a while now, and our next one will be a 25th-anniversary screening of Groundhog Day for Valentine's Day. Expert chocolatier Nadia Williams carefully crafts a bespoke experience at which each guest is given numbered chocolates tailored to correspond with key scenes in the film, and you simply wait for the number cue to eat.
HippFest, 18-22 Mar hippodromecinema.co.uk/hippfest
Rachel Hamada – Director, Take One Action
Cinema-adjacent highlight of 2025?
My favourite film screenings of 2025 were Take One Action's collaborations with Living Rent across Scotland. We screened archive film Red Skirts on Clydeside, about the 1915 Glasgow rent strikes, in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Inverness, and local branches of Living Rent held post-screening audience workshops about local campaigns and actions. It was fascinating to hear the commonalities in housing struggles between cities, but also some of the different issues, from negligent landlords to the impact of tourism.
Favourite film of 2025?
I would like to flag Erige Sehiri's Promised Sky, shown at Jali, the brilliant new African film weekender. Set in Tunisia, it features three Ivorian women, each trying to navigate life there. It was refreshing to see a film exploring migration set outside the Western contexts we are often shown.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
I'm most excited about returning to our co-programming partnership with grassroots groups across Scotland. This was a pilot aimed at decentralising film programming in Scotland, and groups selected and planned their own events as part of our Real Utopias festivals – these were really popular and we are going to be working with the same groups to do further screenings this spring, so watch this space!
Matt Lloyd – Director, Glasgow Short Film Festival
Cinema-adjacent highlight of 2025?
First, a brief visit to Alchemy Film Festival in Hawick, by train and bike, to see Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn’s On Weaving. Attending Alchemy in early May is always a joy, when spring has properly arrived and daft lambs are nutting about the fields. On Weaving explores the modernist home designed by Peter Womersley for textile artists Bernat and Margaret Klein, and considers their legacies in the mills of the River Tweed. Its resonances and associations swirled around me as I battled headwinds back to Galashiels station. And in September, I was very privileged to attend Minikino Film Week, Bali, a festival brimming with passionate enthusiasm for cinema and its possibilities as a catalyst for social change.
Favourite film of 2025?
Whammy Alcazaren’s Water Sports (Philippines), in which two sad boys harness the power of their love to try and survive a world devastated by climate change, speaks pretty eloquently to our time in its absurd, horrific beauty. I’ve not seen many long films this year, but One Battle After Another was a treat.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
I’m hoping for a year of bravery, solidarity and constructive collaboration to combat the growing forces of reaction, oppression and apathy at home and around the world. Also more opportunities to cycle to film festivals.
GSFF, 18-22 Mar glasgowshort.org
Michael Pattison – Co-director, Alchemy Film & Arts
Cinema-adjacent highlight of 2025?
Seeing 100 locals audibly reminisce their way through the first-ever ‘Hawick Pictorial’, shot on 8mm in 1965 and digitised by Alchemy Film & Arts as part of our ongoing screen heritage initiative. Watching 400 school pupils descend upon Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival to see the likes of We Deh Here, Maybelle Peters’s Alchemy-produced 16mm installation about Scotland’s colonial role in the Black Atlantic. Sitting in electric silence through Immigration Services, a performance by Esperanza Mayobre in which the Venezuelan artist lights 100 candles one by one inside Heart of Hawick's dark but increasingly aglow auditorium – a bodily and mercurial commitment to the sequential and structural qualities of cinema, and a work that therefore demanded collective spectatorship.
Each of these was a welcome reminder of why cinema is a social experience, of why we should consume it large and with others.
Favourite film of 2025?
Madison Brookshire’s Set.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
Keeping things live, and lived: to the challenge of promoting cinema as something that needs people in a room while resisting the industry's ableist logics, its tendency to exclude and marginalise.
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, 30 Apr-3 May alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk
Rachel Pronger, Lauren Clarke and Camilla Baier – Founders and Programmers, Invisible Women
Cinema-adjacent highlight of 2025?
Our highlight of the year was undoubtedly our ongoing Mexican melodrama season, a rare chance to bring these electrifying, barely-seen golden age films to UK screens. Working closely with the Filmoteca UNAM and the Permanencia Voluntaria archive in Mexico City, it felt genuinely special to share work that sits so powerfully within Mexico’s popular cinema history but is almost impossible to encounter here. Watching Scottish audiences react to those big emotions, lavish aesthetics and fearless performances, as well as seeing them on the big screen for the first time ourselves, has been a real joy.
Favourite film of 2025?
Rachel: In terms of new films, that would be a tie between Amalia Ulman's Magic Farm (fresh, funny, surprising and mega stylish in a kitschy 90s way) and Louise Weard's Castration Movie Part II (epic four-hour-plus DIY filmmaking taken to its limits, genuinely so transgressive and bold while also being totally engrossing).
Lauren: Michèle Stephenson's True North was a standout for me this year. It shines a light on the 1969 student protests against racism at Concordia University in Montreal, a little-known event in Canadian history. It brings together archive with newly shot intimate interviews, painting a portrait of resistance and championing the role of collective action in bringing about change.
Camilla: Walter Salles' I’m Still Here. A powerful reflection on (collective) memory, survival and political resistance, all anchored by such a stunning, career-defining performance from our Brazilian national treasure Fernanda Torres. And it feels especially meaningful to see Brazilian cinema finally beginning to take up more space internationally.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
Next year is the 100th anniversary of Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving animation. Reiniger is one of our longstanding IW heroines, and her work was super important in terms of the development of animation as a serious cinematic art form – Walt Disney even stole some of her ideas! – so we're hoping to be able to use that centenary as an excuse to celebrate Reiniger's work with some screenings... watch this space!
Rosie Beattie – Programmer, Indy Cinema Group and Queer Cinema Sundays
Cinema adjacent highlight of 2025?
Every Queer Cinema Sundays screening at GFT has been special this year, but I particularly enjoyed screening Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean in May. I have loved this underseen Robert Altman gem since seeing it at SQIFF a couple of years ago, and it was great to see it so warmly received by the audience at GFT. It also had a wonderful introduction by the excellent Jaye Hudson (TGirlsonFilm). Special mention to the Cineskinny team for their collaboration back in January for a wonderful screening of Matthias & Maxime!
Favourite film of 2025?
I was really stunned by the feature debut from Slovenian director Urška Djukić, Little Trouble Girls. It's a tender coming-of-age film that explores sexual awakening and Catholic guilt with the sensual backdrop of the Italian countryside.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
I have been doing a bit of behind-the-scenes work with the lovely programming team at Dublin International Film Festival, so I’m excited to see the whole programme come together and attend the festival for the first time in 2026.
glasgowfilm.org/queer-cinema-sundays
Tomiwa Folorunso, Isabel Moura Mendes and Carmen Thompson – Founders and Programmers, Jali Collective
Cinema adjacent highlight of 2025?
2025 was a huge year for us as it marked the formation of the Collective and also the launch of our inaugural Film Weekender in October. Although it is an impossible task, if we had to pick just one event from the Weekender, it would probably be our opening night! We screened the Scottish Premiere of Swiss-Kenyan filmmaker Damien Hauser’s magical sci-fi romance Memory of Princess Mumbi to a packed Screen 1 at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse. It was such a celebratory moment for Jali, as the culmination of so much work that went into making the Weekender a reality, but also the film really embodied everything about the type of work we’re hoping to share through the Collective. We were so grateful to and humbled by everyone who joined us to mark our first festival and who shared their thoughts and reflections during the post-screening discussion. We’ll remember the night for a long time!
Favourite film of 2025?
Tomiwa: Kouté vwa from filmmaker Maxime Jean-Baptiste. I saw this film almost a year ago, and then it closed out Alchemy Film & Arts in Hawick in May. Set in French Guiana, it’s intimate and painful, yet finds an equilibrium between the heaviness of grief and trauma, the lightness of life, and the necessity of community through it all.
Isabel: It would have to be Hanami, which was included in our Jali Film Weekender this year. It’s a beautifully contemplative feature by Cape Verdean director Denise Fernandes. As someone who is very familiar with these volcanic islands – where my own heritage is from – I was moved by this story of longing and belonging, which will ring true to anyone who exists within the diasporic sphere.
Carmen: I don’t know how I could choose a favourite, but a film I still think about a lot is Malaury Eloi Paisley’s L'homme-vertige: Tales of a City, a documentary about Paisley’s home city of Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe. It is an incredibly poetic and haunting film, and there is such a tenderness to Paisley’s filmmaking and the way she worked with the individuals featured – it moved me a lot.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
We’re really just getting started at Jali Collective. The Weekender was our first big event, and more than anything, what it confirmed for us was that the absence – of Black, African and diaspora film culture – that we have all individually felt for so long as Edinburgh residents has also been felt by so many other people living in the city, and beyond. We can’t wait to continue building on this work, collectively, with our audience. As well as looking forward to the next edition of the Weekender, we also have lots more things cooking already for 2026, so watch this space!
Morvern Cunningham – Member, Leith Kino; Coordinator, Local Cinema Network
Cinema adjacent highlight of 2025?
Leith Kino's 'standing gig only' screening of Stop Making Sense at the Leith Cricket Club. Have you ever yearned to watch a famous filmed gig in a gig environment? Well, Leith Kino made magic happen earlier this year with 100+ revellers dancing, whooping and singing along to one of the best concert films ever made, followed by Talking Heads-themed DJs. I can't wait for the next one.
Favourite film of 2025?
On Falling by Laura Carreira. Quite rightfully winning the Scottish BAFTA for Best Film (and for Best Writer) this year, Carreira shone a light on the little-reflected plight of algorithm-driven work in her debut feature, which followed protagonist Aurora as she spends her days scanning a range of seemingly unrelated items in a nameless warehouse somewhere in Edinburgh.
What are you most looking forward to in 2026?
New documentary Still Pushing Pineapples and its upcoming seaside tour. The film follows Black Lace member Dene Michael as he strives for one more novelty hit beyond the band's (in)famous Agadoo. The tour will visit some of the UK's most popular seaside towns from January onwards, emulating Dene's regular touring schedule.