After a bumper 2014 edition (which featured a handful of Australian films), the Glasgow Film Festival team have been busy planning the next instalment, which runs 18 February to 1 March 2015. Spreading itself even further across the city and taking in an extra day, the festival will include popular returning strands such as FrightFest, Stranger than Fiction and Best of British. Joining the line-up in 2015 will be a host of new strands celebrating, amongst other things, Ingrid Bergman, Glasgow on film, emerging auteurs and – most excitingly (for us at least) – Australian cinema!
Dubbed ‘Strewth!’, the strand pays homage to Commonwealth ties combining new features with time-honoured classics. Here’s the GFF blurb:
As Glasgow hands over the Commonwealth Games to the Gold Coast, we celebrate Australia’s home-grown film industry, from some old favourites to a showcase of the excellent new films coming up from Down Under. The duality between broad, empty outback and the increasingly sleek metropolis, ever-present racial tensions, particularly as they relate to land ownership, and jet-black humour that occasionally veers into a gritted-teeth sense of camp, are themes that run through the last three decades of Aussie cinema, and come together in the films in this strand. Ripper, mate.
Cliched colloquialisms aside – maybe next year they’ll do a Scottish strand called ‘Och, aye!’ – there’s no doubting that this is fantastic news, and whilst this particular advocate for pre-1970 Australian cinema is fairly sure that era will miss out once again, it is great to see a major British film festival giving Australian cinema the attention it deserves.
The 2015 Glasgow Film Festival runs 18 Feb – 1 March, with the full programme announced in late January.
[TOP IMAGE: Bill Travers and Alastair Sim in Geordie (1955), in which a young Highland Scot travels to Melbourne to compete at the 1956 Olympic Games.]
The Far Paradise 