Documentary looms large in the programme of the 19th Glasgow Film Festival, running 1-12 March.
“I think Scotland punches above its weight in terms of the documentaries it produces,” says Allison Gardner, Glasgow Film Festival Co-director. “There has been great support for that genre and so we have featured a lot [of documentaries] over the years. [Public Agency] Screen Scotland have been really excellent…very pro-active in getting stories told, and we’ve got a lot of stories to tell in Scotland.”
Even when the festival isn’t on, the Glasgow Film Theatre programmes large numbers of documentaries – and generally does strong business with them. “They do very well for us,”
Gardner says, citing titles like Laura Poitras’ Oscar contender All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and 2018 mountaineering documentary Free Solo as examples of docs which have scaled the heights through with Glasgow audiences. “People feel it is a worthwhile thing to watch in the cinema. They really feel they’ve learned something….[and] they like the shared communal experience.”
Documentary treats in the coming days include Maurice O’Brien’s The Artist And The Wall Of Death, about Glaswegian visual artist Stephen Skrynka’s Quixotic quest to build his own fairground-style motorbike wall of death.
“It’s quite scary. I was watching the clip where he keeps on coming off and off and off, thinking why are you doing this – this is insanity!” Gardner says. “It’s not the sort of thing I would take up but like with all [documentary] films, you’re learning about other people, other cultures, other ideas, other problems – and you’re walking in the shoes of other people.”
The festival is holding the UK premieres of two of the latest docs from the prolific, Scottish-based auteur, Mark Cousins. One is My Name is Alfred Hitchcock in which Cousins gives us the illusion that the legendary director is telling his story in own words. A Hitchcock monologue is performed on the soundtrack in pitch perfect fashion by impressionist Alistair McGowan. The second Cousins doc that is Glasgow-bound is The March On Rome, Cousins’ film about the rise of fascism and the Mussolini era in Italy.
Another title Gardner highlights is Free Money from Lauren DeFilippo and Sam Soko which tells the story of how a well-meaning western non-profit, GiveDirectly, introduced universal basic income in Kogutu, a village in Kenya, with very mixed results.
The GFF boss likewise talks up San San F Young’s Hong Kong Mixtape, about rappers and the fight for creative freedom in Hong Kong at a time when mainland China is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
Very different, but [she believes] just as compelling, is the sports doc Cassius X: Becoming Ali, about the early years of boxing champ Muhammad Ali and made by US director Muta’Ali Muhammad, inspired by the book by Scottish broadcaster and author Stuart Cosgrove.
Also revving up at the GFF on the sports front is a Formula 1 film, Torquil Jones’s Villeneuve Pironi, about the ferocious competition between rival drivers (and Ferrari teammates) Gilles Villenueve and Didier Pironi.
There are also some older documentaries in the programme including such titles as When Women Kill, What Sex Am I?and Down And Out In America from Oscar winning actress and documentary maker Lee Grant. These films may have been made in the 1980s but, Gardner says, “a lot of them have real relevance.”
One title bound to intrigue the Glaswegian audience is Elly M. Taylor’s 1996 film Angelou On Burns which looks at legendary US author Maya Angelou’s fascination with Scottish poet, Robert Burns. This was selected for the festival.
Gardner believes that these films will attract different spectators and that there isn’t a homogenous “documentary audience” as such.
This year, the GFF isn’t just showing documentaries. It has actually commissioned one too. The Freedom Machine(screening on a pay what you can basis) was overseen by Scottish film curator Jo Reid and pulls together archive footage revealing how Scottish women got on their bikes to find freedom on the road. This project will be “toured” to other venues across Scotland after the Festival. The Festival is working with BFI-backed Film Hub Scotland in getting the film seen across the country.
Sales agents and distributors will be in town for the industry focus on 6-9 March, and will be looking to acquire some of the films on display. (Docs launched at the GFF in previous years, which include 2022’s The Hermit Of Treig, have often gone on to have long lives in cinemas in the UK and elsewhere.)
Gardner and her programming team haven’t created a separate sidebar for the documentaries. Instead, they’re dotted titles throughout the programme. “I think audiences don’t really give a shit about strands if I am honest. I think audiences want to see films that speak to them. Strands are useful for us to signpost [titles] but I don’t think that is how audiences choose films.”
The festival has kept the same ticket prices since 2019 and is trying hard to make all its films, including the documentaries, as affordable as possible.
“We’re trying to encourage people to take a chance that doesn’t cost them financially,” Gardner notes of why GFF remains one of the UK’s most accessible and audience-friendly film events.This year’s edition marks Gardner’s colleague, GFF Co-Director Allan Hunter’s final festival.
