Running from today, the Glasgow Film Festival (28 February-10 March) will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a fulsome programme for audiences and industry alike, which includes 11 world and international premieres, plus a plethora of guests.

It opens with the UK premiere of Love Lies Bleeding [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], the new film by Saint Maud [+leggi anche:
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Glasgow-based director Ciaran Lyons makes his feature debut with the world premiere of Tummy Monster, a hallucinogenic Scottish black comedy about a self-centred tattoo artist who gets embroiled in a bizarre psychological battle with an international popstar. Another world premiere is Edge of Summer [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], the feature debut by British director Lucy Cohen, in which a mother-and-daughter holiday to Cornwall takes a dark turn after a discovery in a tin mine changes everything. Scottish icon Billy Connolly will take centre stage with a brand-new restoration of the little-seen 1976 documentary Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet, which follows Billy on his legendary 1975 tour of Ireland, while a more contemporary Scottish comedy icon will round off the festival with the world premiere of the closing film, Janey. The movie is an honest, moving and often hilarious documentary about Glasgow comedian Janey Godley, interweaving stories from her life with footage from her “Not Dead Yet” tour, in the wake of her terminal cancer diagnosis.

High-profile UK premieres include those of lker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge [+leggi anche:
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intervista: İlker Çatak
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scheda film], alongside a number of documentaries about behind-the-camera legends, including Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger [+leggi anche:
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Other sections include the MUBI-sponsored GFF Audience Award, a prize given to an outstanding feature by a first- or second-time director. These include Woken, Alan Friel’s psychological sci-fi thriller set in the near future, starring Maxine Peake; and the doc The Home Game, the true story of how a plucky village football team became determined to play a home game in Iceland’s FA Cup.

FrightFest, a three-day horror binge, showcases 11 new features, while the Czech Republic is the country in focus in Czech, Please!

Guests attending this year’s festival include Viggo Mortensen, Rose Glass, Glasgow-born Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald, BAFTA-winning British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi and Ben Wheatley.

The five-day industry section – extended by a day for this year’s edition of the festival – includes a number of master classes and networking opportunities. These will include “Current Climate: The Distribution & Exhibition Landscape”, in which leading sales agent HanWay, the BFI and the Glasgow Film Theatre will focus on the current ebbs and flows of the UK scene, and “NextGen”, in which the directors from a new wave of British filmmaking – namely, Scrapper [+leggi anche:
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