Alistair Harkness: Women to take centre stage at 2020 Glasgow Film Festival

Opening with Alice Winocour’s Eva Green-starring astronaut drama Proxima and closing with the Coky Giedroyc-directed adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl, this year’s Glasgow Film Festival is putting its money where its mouth is in terms of improving the gender balance of film festivals.

Eva Green stars in Proxima, which will open this year's Glasgow Film Festival. PIC: Picturehouse/PA Wire

New work from women filmmakers and films focussed on female stories feature prominently across the various strands, with homecoming premieres for Our Ladies and Scottish director Eva Riley’s debut feature The Perfect 10; intriguing-sounding horror films from award-winning debut filmmaker Rose Glass (St Maud) and acclaimed Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska (The Other Lamb); new movies from the pioneering likes of Persepolis director Marjane Satrapi (Marie Curie biopic Radioactive) and Wadjda director Haifaa al-Mansour (The Perfect Candidate) and new documentaries on Billie Holliday (Billie) and Toni Morrison (The Pieces I Am) as well as Rubika Shah’s London Film Festival-winning Rock Against Racism documentary White Riot.

There are also films featuring prominent leading roles for Kelly Macdonald (Australian drama Dirt Music), Sally Hawkins (Eternal Beauty), and Juliet Binoche and Catherine Deneuve (Japanese master Hirokazo Kore-eda’s The Truth), as well as Mark Cousins’ 14-hour doc Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema, which is screening in five parts and comes with an accompanying mini retrospective designed to help rethink the male-dominated film canon.

Elsewhere the festival features much-anticipated offerings from home territory and beyond, including new work from Scottish directors Scott Graham (Run) and Peter Mackie Burns (Rialto), the Cannes-winning Brazilian freak-out Bacurau, Macbeth director Justin Kurzel’s The True History of the Kelly Gang, cult mavericks Justin Benon and Aaron Moorhead’s Synchronic and the sure-to-be divisive The Painted Bird, the brutality of which caused mass walk-outs at its Venice Film Festival premiere. You’ve been warned.