What's on at GFT in August 2024

Joining the ranks of famous faces who have visited GFT over the decades, Kneecap will take part in Q&As following two preview screenings of Kneecap on Tuesday 20 August, which tells the real-life story of how this anarchic Belfast trio became the unlikely figureheads of a civil rights movement to save and reinvigorate their mother tongue.

Other visitors to the cinema next month include director Kevin Cameron, whose brilliant documentary on Alasdair Gray (now titled Alasdair Gray: A Life in Progress, Progressed) has been expanded to fill in the genesis of Poor Things and includes interviews with people who Gray specifically asked not to be interviewed when he was alive. Gray’s biographer, the novelist Rodge Glass, will introduce a special screening of Poor Things on Sunday 18 August.

Film fans can also catch a Q&A with Ehsan Khoshbakht, director of Celluloid Underground — an autobiographical documentary about Khoshbakht’s own experience of growing up in Iran after the 1979 revolution, when his love of cinema became the catalyst for his rebellion against the Islamic regime.

We will play host to Curzon’s Will Heaven Fall Upon Us? — a retrospective of the work of Hungarian director Béla Tarr, whose films present dystopian fables on the fall of Communism. The retrospective will include screenings of Werckmeister Harmonies, Damnation, The Turin Horse and Tarr’s seven-hour epic Sátántangó. 

Cinema Rediscovered on Tour, a Watershed project in collaboration with Park Circus and Studio Canal, will present Out of Their Depth: Corruption, Scandal and Lies in the New Hollywood — a special season curated by Cinema Rediscovered founder Mark Cosgrove. In the early 1970s, America was increasingly in social and political turmoil and this heightened unease in the mainstream American psyche was reflected in films from the New Hollywood, the period where the traditional male hero of the classic studio era was replaced by a protagonist who, whilst they thought they were in control, found themselves increasingly out of their depth. Films in the season include The Long Goodbye, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor and Chinatown, which will be followed by a panel discussion about Chinatown’s enduring greatness and the challenge faced by film lovers when considering the historic crimes of director Roman Polanski. GFT Programme Manager Paul Gallagher will host the discussion with film critic Alistair Harkness, film journalist and programmer Rafa Sales Ross, and film programmer Raymah Tariq.

Our regular CineMasters season, which showcases the work of key figures from film history, returns in August with a celebration of the director John Sayles. Now independent cinema royalty, Sayles began his career writing scripts for Roger Corman. Sayles’s films have a strong sense of community in them, from the Mine Union workers of Matewan (1987), the community under threat of corruption and discrimination in City of Hope (1991), the baseball team members caught up in the scandal of Eight Men Out (1988), to the townsfolk of Frontera in Lone Star (1996) — all of which are screening at GFT in August. Lone Star screenings will include a new recorded introduction from John Sayles and producer Maggi Renzi.

We will also commemorate the remarkable character actor Donald Sutherland (1935-2024) with a mini season of his most powerful performances: as the father of a suicidal son in Ordinary People (1980), as an average-Joe-turned-hero in sci-fi horror Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and as a father tormented by grief in Don't Look Now.

Classics fans will delight in our mini season celebrating the 100th anniversary of the legendary studio Columbia Pictures, with special screenings of Orson Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai, Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century and Frank Capra’s Mr Deeds Goes to Town.

Our long-running Scorsese of the Month season continues in August with The Last Temptation of Christ, and the cinema’s Queer Cinema Sundays screening for August will be Go Fish. Snapshot, a season of films about Black girls coming of age on their own terms presented by T A P E, will continue at GFT in August with Alma’s Rainbow.

Special screenings in August include Robert Altman’s masterpiece 3 Women, screening in memory of actress Shelley Duvall (1949-2024); a preview screening of The Mountain Within Me, which follows rugby player Ed Jackson’s journey from suffering a catastrophic spinal cord injury to climbing Snowdonia, the Alps and Himalayas; and 40th anniversary screenings of The Neverending Story.

Must-see new releases and re-releases arriving in August include Kensuke’s Kingdom, the animated adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s beloved novel, which will screen with a short recorded introduction by Morpurgo; the return of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro to the big screen; Caligula: The Ultimate Cut — a reconstruction of the notorious Roman spectacle originally released in 1980 which finally realises the creators’ original vision; and the return of Glasgow Film Festival 2024 Audience Award winner The Home Game, to GFT.

Other highlights include The Echo, Shayda, Sky Peals, Radical, Tuesday, Only the River Flows, Hollywoodgate, Longlegs, Dìdi, The Mountain Within Me, Kneecap, Between the Temples and Cuckoo, along with extra screenings of Dune Part Two on 70mm and La Chimera.

Tickets for our August Programme are on sale now from glasgowfilm.org and the GFT Box Office.