The 2021 online Glasgow Film Festival is about silver linings and certainly not gloom and doom, co-director Allan Hunter tells Business Doc Europe ahead of the 17th edition which kicks off February 24.
Back in February/March 2020, Glasgow was one of the last festivals to present a full edition, unaffected by Covid or any requirement to go online.
“We were just at that stage when people were doing elbow bumps and washing their hands a lot, and not realising quite what was in store for everyone,” says festival co-director Allan Hunter of events that played out a year ago. “We were very lucky. We finished a week before everything started to shut down.”
Twelve months on and the world is a very different place and of course, like all other international events right now, Glasgow will be presented virtually. But Hunter is upbeat. “It may be terrible circumstances in which we find ourselves but actually maybe there are some opportunities as well, to go online and to reach audiences that we haven’t reached before,” he says. “We are trying to look at it as a silver lining of opportunities rather than doom and gloom.”
He points to the online ticket sales for the opening film Minari (fiction). Yes, online is a completely unknown quantity, but nevertheless Minari has already seen virtual ticket sales well in advance of the capacity of the three cinemas that would have shown it on opening night. “That’s pretty encouraging,” says Hunter.
What’s more, the festival has always been staged at that time of the year when there is generally a sense of renewed optimism. “It almost feels like that stepping stone for people between winter and getting back out into the world,” he stresses of recent editions. “You can start to come out and go to the cinema, and just that feeling that spring is blossoming and life is beginning again. I suppose we kind of like being in that slot.”
The documentary line-up at Glasgow FF is strong in 2021, with a particular emphasis on home-produced docs and Scottish subjects. These include the eagerly awaited Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In, about the legendary Manchester United manager, directed by his son Jason Ferguson, and Anthony Baxter’s Eye of the Storm, which follows one of Scotland’s most gifted painters, James Morrison, through the last two years of his life.
Hunter points out how Scottish docmakers have been “incredibly nimble and resourceful” in getting their films made in such trying times, referencing Baxter’s story of the pioneering artist Morrison. “There are stories and tales that Morrison tells of when he went to the Arctic and [had] an encounter with a polar bear,” he says. “And for many reasons – budget, Covid – Anthony Baxter was never going to be able to go to the Arctic to try and capture or recreate some of that. So there is some beautiful animation in the film from Catriona Black that kind of adopts Morrison’s style to provide some visual means of conveying those stories that they couldn’t film.”
Hunter also discusses Alastair Cole’s Iorram (Boat Song), the first feature doc made entirely in Scottish Gaelic, and described as a haunting evocation of life among the fishing community of the Outer Hebrides. The film makes extensive use of audio archive that recorded the practices, routines and superstitions of fisherfolk from the first half of the 20thCentury, which Cole counterpoints with contemporary fishing footage.
“There is a real [sense] of ‘bringing ghosts of the past to life’ because of the way that it is cut between the stories that they are telling from maybe 1910 or 1920 and what has changed and what has stayed the same in the Scottish fishing industry of the moment,” says Hunter.
Other Scottish docs include Yer Old Faither by Adelaide Fringe director Heather Croall (also former Sheffield Doc/Fest chief) which receives its UK premiere. Narrated by playwright and actor Gary McNair, it explores the life of the director’s father, Glaswegian John Croall, who moved to Australia in 1970 and bought hundreds of children into the world as a local obstetrician. Stacey Lee’s documentary Underplayed is an intimate and revealing look at gender inequality in the electronic dance music scene, which features the city of Glasgow and local DJ Nightwave.
David Whitney’s Killing Escobar reconstructs Scottish mercenary and ex-SAS operative Peter McAleese’s mission to assassinate Pablo Escobar while the ‘Bridging the Gap – Turbulence’ strand will showcase four shorts from the Scottish Documentary Institute’s emerging talent initiative including: Against the Tide; Harmonic Spectrum; Racing Stock and Venus & Mars.
If more evidence is needed of the festival’s desire to roll out the best of Scottish doc, Hunter stresses how director Felipe Bustos Sierra’s Nae Pasaran (about Scottish workers’ refusal to work on aeroplane parts to be sent to the Chilean junta in the 1970s) was the festival closer in 2018; how Matt Pinder’s feature doc Harry Birrell: Films of Love and War picked up the Audience award in 2019, and how Mark Cousins’ epic Women Make Film was screened in its entirety in 2020.
“Scottish documentary is in a good place,” Hunter underlines.
Other doc world-premieres at Glasgow include Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, about the founder of 70’s punk outfit X-Ray Spex, and co-directed by her daughter Celeste Bell and Paul Sng. In Luke White’s documentary Handsome, Nicholas Bourne and his brother Alex set off on a journey to meet other siblings with Down’s Syndrome, as Nicholas prepares to become Alex’s full-time, dedicated carer.
“I think there is a nice diversity of stuff in the programme, and also there are a couple of documentaries that are just really cinematic,” Hunter adds. “Enemies of the State (Sonia Kennebeck) and The Dissident (Bryan Fogel) are covering really interesting ‘torn from the news’ stories. I also feel that they could be a big Hollywood thriller, so I think the accessibility that people are getting into some of these documentaries is really interesting.”
What’s more, Glasgow is very much on the industry radar, and to underline this the festival offers an intensive 6-day programme of talks, panels and networking opps. These include a session on working with disabled filmmakers and analysis of black filmmaking in Scotland, which specifically looks to address the paucity of feature films made by the country’s black filmmakers. BFI Doc Society will also host sessions on funding opportunities for Scottish doc makers and will offer insights into impact tools and audience engagement for independent feature documentaries.
Hunter adds how Glasgow FF is as much interested in the films’ career after festival doors close on March 7. “We have good relationships with a lot of UK distributors to the point where you can say to somebody, ‘look this film is here, we really like it, we think this might work for you, take a look at it’,” he points out. “Also increasingly, there are [industry] people who are like, ‘tell us what you’ve got this year and anything that might be of interest to us.’ It keeps building and building.”
