Glasgow Film Festival 2012: The highlights

Now in its seventh year, the Film Festival compiles a varied programme, pairing the latest efforts from Scots directors with classics from bygone eras. This year’s Film Festival includes a tribute to tap-dancing legend Gene Kelly, and a number of Scottish films, including an innovative screening of ‘Glasgow: Symphony of a City’, which incorporates a “live improvisation of sound and image,” according to glasgowfilm.org.

Whilst there are films from all around the world, we’ve chosen to focus on the Scottish-based films and productions. Here, we provide you with the rundown on five full-length films, and two short films featuring soundtracks from Scottish musicians.

1. Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy

Whilst James McAvoy is currently filming Irvine Welsh’s ‘Filth’ in Edinburgh, the Glasgow Film Festival is showing Ecstasy, starring Adam Sinclair and Kristin Kreuk. Based on Welsh’s novella ‘The Undefeated,’ the third in the Three Tales of Chemical Romance collection, it charts the relationship between Lloyd Buist, an aging clubber and drug addict, and Heather Thompson, who is bored with her marriage and keen for a change in her life, and plays Buist’s love interest. Billed as a dark romantic comedy, the film was initially intended to be a joint Scottish-Canadian production, but was announced at the Toronto Film Festival in 2008 as a Canadian production.

2. The Decoy Bride

David Tennant stars as a writer planning a low-key wedding with his Hollywood actress fiancée Lara, played by Alice Eve, desperate to escape the media spotlight and the attentions of one particular journalist who is obsessed with her. A remote Scottish island appears to be the ideal location, but the media get wind of the plans and head for the island to cover the wedding. A plan is hatched to stage a fake ceremony to throw the media off the trail. Trainspotting star Kelly MacDonald plays the title character, and there are appearances by Dylan Moran and Michael Urie.

3. Silver Tongues

Based on his short of the same name, Scottish filmmaker and method writer Simon Arthur, a writer/director with Screen Academy Scotland, brings us the feature-length version of ‘Silver Tongues,’ following Gerry (Lee Tergesen) and Joan (Enid Graham) as they travel through the lesser-known part of New York, indulging in their pastime of extreme role-playing, engineered to manipulate and humiliate everyone they come across. Often dark and unsettling, Arthur’s work in the past has won awards, with ‘Rebel Song’ (shown at the Brooklyn Film Festival in June 2007) winning the Director’s Award for Cinematography at the Woods Hole Film Festival in 2008.

4. The Maggie

Another darkly comic film, ‘The Maggie’ will be shown in the surroundings of Clyde-built The Tall Ship. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, who was also responsible for Whisky Galore, The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success, the film centres on an American airline executive, played by Paul Douglas, who is determined to surprise his wife with a summer home on a small island near Kiltarra in Annan. As he tries - and fails - to enlist the help of someone to ship furniture and equipment over to the island, he ends up hiring a rickety ship with a devious captain as a last resort. Something of a precursor to Bill Forsyth’s ‘Local Hero,’ The Maggie will be shown in the fully-heated cargo hold of The Tall Ship.

5. Glasgow: Symphony of a Great City

In this innovative spectacle, a group of sound designers, calling themselves Synchresis, devised a new approach to cinema. Using a mix of computer programming and live performance, the film is improvised along with the sound, in a reversal of the standard cinematic technique of the image leading. Synchresis have joined forces with a filmmaker to construct this work to Glasgow, made especially for the 2012 Film Festival. The live film event will last for around a quarter of an hour, but will be shown three times, with intervals in between for discussions with the artists, giving each audience a unique experience as they alter the soundtrack to suit each performance.

The Glasgow Short Film Festival competition, running alongside the main event, will show 69 films in two separate international and Scottish categories, including five Scottish films which will be shown in both. With seven world premieres, one international premiere, three European premieres, twenty-one UK premieres and twenty Scottish premieres, the Short Film Festival promises to be full of variety.

Included in the selected films are two efforts by Scottish musicians: John Maclean of The Beta Band will present Pitch Black Heist starring Michael Fassbender, and the debut short Long Distance Information, by Douglas Hart of The Jesus & Mary Chain will also be shown. Julian Schwanitz’s documentary ‘Kirkcaldy Man’, about champion darts player Jocky Wilson, will also receive its UK premiere.