Almost all children will eventually leave the nest. For GSFF, 2015 was that year. We said goodbye to the warm loving embrace of the Glasgow Film Festival and struck out on our own, moving our schedule from February (alongside the main festival) to March. Attendance at the festival jumped by 42%.
This was not least because the eighth edition of the festival featured some of our most ambitious moments to date. The Briggait next to the River Clyde was transformed into a Vertical Cinema for one night only to kick off the festival. Hamburg’s famed event A Wall Is A Screen came to Glasgow and lit up the walls of the city centre with film. The perils of Ukraine were brought to us by Babylon’13, and the renewal of Glasgow was examined with a programme named after the city’s motto – Let Glasgow Flourish.
I adored A Wall Is A Screen… It managed to take two activities which are inherently lame – outdoor screenings and walking tours – and cut-and-shut them together to make something thrilling.
The event saw a group of us snaked around the north end of Glasgow’s city centre with a projector in tow, appropriating concrete and brick walls and turning them into cinema screens. There was something subversive about the whole thing, like we were a gang of cinema bandits putting these commercial spaces to more worthwhile use.
At the start of the night it felt like we had a few dozen people, but by the final screening against Buchanan Galleries we had a party of almost 600, many of them randoms who’d confusedly joined the throng along the way!
Jamie Dunn, GSFF 2013 Submissions Viewer and Film Editor at The Skinny.
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Award Winners
Bill Douglas Award for International Short Film
Shipwreck – Morgan Knibbe | Netherlands | 2014
GSFF Scottish Short Film Award
Directed By Tweedie – Duncan Cowles | Scotland | 2014
International Audience Award
World of Tomorrow – Don Hertzfeldt | USA | 2015
Scottish Audience Award
Dropping Off Michael – Zam Salim | Scotland | 2014
Channel 4 Award for Innovation in Storytelling
Monkey Love Experiments – Ainslie Henderson & Will Anderson | Scotland | 2014
International Jury
Christoffer Olofsson – Programme Director, Uppsala International Short Film Festival
Olha Reiter – Executive Director, Lviv Film Commission
Daniel Wolfe – Filmmaker
Scottish Jury
Wendy Griffin – Producer, Selkie Productions
Kevin B. Lee – Filmmaker
Jorge Rivero – Programmer, Curtocircuito Santiago de Compostela International Short Film Festival
Channel 4 Award Jury
Penelope Bartlett – Programmer, Chicago International Film Festival and Founding Co-Director, Glasgow Short Film Festival
Marbelle – Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Directors Notes/Features Editor, Showreel
Susie Wright – Channel 4 Nations and Regions Executive