Glasgow Film Festival to celebrate 20th birthday

The Glasgow Film Theatre has been open for 50 years

The Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) will be celebrating three anniversaries next year, with a host of screenings showcasing the city's film history.

The programme will be celebrating the 20th edition of the film festival, 50 years of the festival's home - the Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) - and 85 years since the cinema was first built.

Two screenings, part of the GFF's Legendary Special Events strand, will celebrate the cinema itself, with one film from when it opened in 1939 and one from when it reopened under its new name in 1974.

Another group of screenings, Our Story So Far, will be a selection of films that mark milestones in the history of Glasgow cinema.

The legendary Special Events

The cinema first opened on 18 May 1939 as The Cosmo cinema.

Designed by Glasgow architects James McKissack and WJ Anderson II, the windowless art deco building was Scotland's first arts cinema.

It was also the last cinema to be built before the outbreak of WW2, just four months later.

The opening screening at the Cosmo was the 1937 French drama film Life Dances On (Un carnet de bal).

But to celebrate the B-listed building's 85th anniversary, the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming, will be screened.

The Technicolor film was nominated for six Oscars when it was released, yet failed to make a profit until its 1949 re-release.

The Cosmo cinema in 1970

The Cosmo closed in 1973 due to financial difficulties and was subsequently bought by the Scottish Film Council.

A year later it was reopened as the GFT, having a slightly more modern remit, it showed more experimental films, started to have screening seasons and showing late night cult-classics.

For the GFT's 50th anniversary it will screen John Waters independent, cult-classic dark comedy Female Trouble.

The film follows a high school student who runs away from home, gets pregnant while hitchhiking and becomes entangled in crime to prove "crime is beauty".

Our Story So Far

The festival's annual free morning retrospective screenings will be a journey through Glasgow film history.

Four of the films were released in 1939, a year important for Glasgow film history with the opening of The Cosmo, but also for cinema as a whole, considered by many as the greatest year in film history.

The four films being shown will be Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Ninotchka, Only Angels Have Wings and Wuthering Heights.

The next three screenings will be of films from 1974, the year the GFT opened.

The films shown will be The Godfather Part II, Young Frankenstein and Foxy Brown.

To celebrate the first ever GFF, three films from its inaugural year, 2005, will be shown.

These three screenings will be of Brick, Walk the Line and Wolf Creek.

The GFF23 opening gala premiere of Girl, which was filmed in Glasgow

Each year the GFF focuses on the contemporary and rediscovered cinema of a particular country, with this year the country being Czechia, also know as Czech Republic.

The films being screened come from a wide range of genres.

These include films such as Daisies, a radical feminist film from Věra Chytilová, once banned for its stance on communism and patriarchy.

Brothers - Czechia’s official submission to the 2024 Academy Awards for the Best International Film - examines liberation and resilience in a story focused on an anti-Communist resistance group.

Is There Any Place For Me, Please? is a debut feature documentary which paints an intimate portrayal of one woman navigating life after an acid attack.

Allison Gardner, the chief executive of Glasgow Film and director of GFF since 2007, will be programming 2024's GFF alongside a group of emerging voices in the Scottish film festival scene.

She said: "I am overjoyed to select titles for the 20th edition of the festival alongside a group of programmers with such vibrant and innovative ideas."

"Each programmer has been able to make their unique stamp on the upcoming festival."