Film festivals are usually very strict about phones being turned off during screenings. Not this time. GSFF today announces its 2020 opening event, the Scottish premiere of live expanded cinema performance My First Film by Zia Anger, which opens with the filmmaker, seated amongst the audience, requesting via onscreen text that phones should be kept on.
Anger is probably best known as a music video director, although her work with indie music doyennes like Jenny Hval and Angel Olsen blurs the lines of performance, video art and filmmaking, often while revealing its own artifice. My First Film, partly the story of Anger’s first, ‘abandoned’ feature film, mirrors the fragmented, multi-app experience of being connected to the world in the modern age – Anger creates the screening live for the audience, narrating and annotating via live typing, providing atmospheric music through pop-up YouTube windows and, crucially, sending fragments of the story straight to the audience’s own devices. It’s partly film, partly theatre experience, partly confessional, partly meditation on failure, partly live essay on the place of the female filmmaker and wholly unique, and GSFF is delighted to offer audiences a rare chance to experience this hugely-acclaimed event, live in Glasgow.
Following our tradition of staging events that play with the relationship between music and film, this year’s special Saturday night event, Felix In Wonderland, directed by avant-garde film portraitist Marie Losier, is an innovative look at the tingling creativity of cult electronic musician Felix Kubin. Its UK premiere at GSFF will be followed by a rare live gig by Kubin himself, supported by Glasgow’s own R&B-disco-house-dreampop-infused electronica outfit Babe.
Losier inscribes her own aesthetic into every available cinematic aspect as she captures Kubin’s public, private and imaginary worlds, resulting in a synchronous celebration of sound, film, and the visionary few who sculpt their potential. Experience fifty minutes inside a joyous audiovisual collaboration, featuring the challenge of feeding a microphone to a Slovakian dog, bathtub audio experiments and a trumpet-playing ventriloquist’s dummy.
This UK Premiere screening and live show has been made possible thanks to a Franco-German collaboration between the Alliance française de Glasgow and the Goethe-Institut Glasgow.