Glasgow Southside Film Festival.
Glasgow's Southside Film Festival returns for a fifth edition, and, as ever, the organisers have made inventive use of a variety of venues south of the Clyde
The Southside Film Festival, now in its fifth year, was a pop-up long before pop-ups were all the rage. Its appropriation of non-cinema spaces has become its biggest asset; the joy of the festival is its clever use of venues and this embracing of its civic spaces makes every screening feel part of the community. For example, at this year’s event you can watch Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in the grand surroundings of Queens Park Church (10 Oct), catch The Gorbals Story in the eponymous borough’s St Francis Community Centre (9 Oct), or experience Bill Forsyth’s deadpan debut, That Sinking Feeling, in a drained swimming pool (10 Oct). The pool in question is the long-closed Govanhill Baths, which also hosts a screening of United We Will Swim… Again, documenting the long battle by southside residents to renovate the baths and bring them back into the heart of the community (10 Oct).
The Southside Film Festival, now in its fifth year, was a pop-up long before pop-ups were all the rage. Its appropriation of non-cinema spaces has become its biggest asset; the joy of the festival is its clever use of venues and this embracing of its civic spaces makes every screening feel part of the community. For example, at this year’s event you can watch Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in the grand surroundings of Queens Park Church (10 Oct), catch The Gorbals Story in the eponymous borough’s St Francis Community Centre (9 Oct), or experience Bill Forsyth’s deadpan debut, That Sinking Feeling, in a drained swimming pool (10 Oct). The pool in question is the long-closed Govanhill Baths, which also hosts a screening of United We Will Swim… Again, documenting the long battle by southside residents to renovate the baths and bring them back into the heart of the community (10 Oct).
Scottish cinema is the festival’s real focus. We’d encourage you to head along to the festival’s screening of Grant McPhee’s great doc on the Scottish punk scene Big Gold Dream, followed by a gig (Glad Cafe, 9 Oct). Cinema discussion Scotland on Screen, meanwhile, asks if Scottish cinema has influenced how we view ourselves – film writer Jonathan Murray and director Eleanor Yule give their thoughts (Glad Cafe, 11 Oct). And then there’s southside-made Much Ado About Govan, a lo-fi Shakespeare adaptation shot by local teens, which sounds like a riot (Kinning Park Complex, 9 Oct). All that, plus a crash course in film review writing with critic Siobhan Synnot (The Glad Foundation, 11 Oct) and a rare screening of Laurel and Hardy short Putting Pants on Philip (Pollokshaws Burgh Hall, 9 Oct), to celebrate Laurel’s southside connections (he grew up in Mount Florida). The curtain comes down with Dziga Vertov’s playful documentary A Man with a Movie Camera (Pollokshaws Burgh Hall, 11 Oct), a fittingly inventive spectacle for a festival full of invention.
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