Nina Gantz’s short film Wander to Wonder won the International Audience Award at the Glasgow Short Film Festival 2024. This leaves no doubt that the 14 minute short deeply impacted its viewers. But in what way?  Wander to Wonder is a puppet stop-motion animation from the Netherlands, written by Daan Bakker, Stienette Bosklopper, Simon Cartwright,…

The Glasgow Short Film Festival once again highlighted the Scottish cinematic landscape with its diverse and thought-provoking programme, showcasing a wide range of short films from both local and international filmmakers. Throughout the weekend, I was impressed by the meticulous curation, engaging thematic explorations, and vibrant community atmosphere that defined the Festival. A film that…

Mouth, screening in (and eventually winning) the Young Scottish Filmmaker Prize competition was my personal highlight of Glasgow Short Film Festival. While I enjoyed all the entries in the competition, Guy Woods’ film really stood out to me. The plot follows a recently deceased man named Robert (Rob Turner) who is met by a casual…

Growing up in the Highlands I was never far from my heritage.  Burial mounds, standing stones and ancient battlefields litter the surrounding area. In the Highlands there is a constant sense of what came before. Go down any country road and you’ll find dilapidated croft houses, scars of the clearances. These reminders of our past…

Eerily sparse but far from still. Hauntingly silent, save the rustle of the sea. The far-flung Ardnamurchan landscape whistles through archived footage and nifty animations in Hannah Hunter’s Their Accounts. You might half anticipate the unease of the seemingly vacant scenes to be punctured by the frustrated Thatcher-era words of The Specials – “This town,…

Friday 22 March (13:15) passholders only CCA Cinema // 1h20m // 15+ Friday 22 March (20:45) GFT Cinema 3 // 1h45m // 15+ Sunday 24 March (16:30) Civic House // 1h45m // 15+ Our final GSFF24 Bill Douglas Award programme, and we’re not going out lightly. This selection of films consider various forms of physical…

Revolutionary acts drive the fifth Bill Douglas Award programme, so we pay homage to Frantz Fanon in its title. In Suddenly TV we are taken into an important moment in Sudan’s ongoing struggle for liberation through the eyes of young revolutionaries, while the eco-resistance leaders in Terra Mater, clad in electronic waste, highlight colonial and capitalist damage through…

Friday 22 March (15:30) GFT Cinema 3 // 1h45m // 15+ Saturday 23 March (10:30) passholders only CCA Cinema // 1h20m // 15+ Saturday 23 March (20:45) GFT Cinema 3 // 1h45m // 15+ Tying in with wider threads throughout this year’s festival (see Jyoti Mistry, Cine Mujer, and Until Liberation 4), the films in…

Personal and collective memory and imagination, traces of what was and seeds of how things could be. Our third Bill Douglas Award programme spends time lingering on the past but also gently simmers with possibility. Nothing But Shadows, abouta woman’s dealings with mortality and grief, dips into a subtle magical realism with an enigmatic lead performance, while Pacific…

All films in our second Bill Douglas Award programme are led by ideas and characters that cannot be detached from a sense of place or defined location. The intriguing 2720 provides a lively but sensitive insight into a Lisbon community that suffers from poverty and overpolicing – a generous piece of docufiction. In the experimental documentary The despair…