The Glasgow Film Festival 2025 line-up revealed, as Jessica Lange, James McAvoy and Martin Compston headline


James McAvoy, Martin Compston, Tilda Swinton, James Cosmo and Jack Lowden will feature in the swansong programme from Glasgow Film Festival's outgoing director.
New films from Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Nicholas Cage and Ed Harris will be championed in the final event overseen by Allison Gardner, who has been involved with the festival since its launch 20 years ago.
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Oscar-winning Hollywood actress Jessica Lange will visit the festival for a special event discussing her six decades in the film industry, including roles in King Kong, Tootsie, Rob Roy, Blue Sky and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Glasgow-born McAvoy will be taking part in his in-conversation event looking back at a screen career that has included starring roles in The Last King of Scotland, Shameless, Atonement, Filth and the X-Men franchise.
Documentaries will focus on Britain's father-and-son Formula One champions Damon and Graham Hill, Canadian musician and producer Peaches, Detroit techno star Carl Craig and a group of right-wing supporters of Donald Trump.


Musician-turned-filmmaker John Maclean will open the festival, which runs from February 26 until March 9, with the world premiere of his second feature film, samurai thriller Tornado, which was shot on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
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Hide AdSet in 18th-century Britain, samurai survival thriller Tornado will feature Jack Lowden, Tim Roth and Japanese stars Takehiro Hira and Koki in a story about a young woman who decides to steal from a gang of ruthless criminals to avenge her father's murder.
The festival will close with the world premiere of a documentary following Aberdeenshire teenager's epic cycle journey from Hampden Park to the opening game of the European Football Championships in German - just months after suffering life-threatening injuries in New York when he was struck by a car.
Filmmaker Martyn Robertson joined Ethan Walker, fellow Tartan Army foot-soldier Stephen Collie and Glasgow surgeon Gordon Mackay on the 746-mile odyssey.


Other premieres include Edinburgh-based filmmaker Laura Carreira's award-winning debut feature On Falling, which follows a lonely Portuguese woman working in a vast Scottish warehouse, and Athina Rachel Tsangari's "folk horror" Harvest, which was filmed in Argyllshire.
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Hide AdThe festival will host a new premiere for new Amazon drama Fear, a new Glasgow-set psychological thriller that will see Compston and Anjili Mohindra play a wealthy couple whose move from London to a dream new home are turned into a nightmare by a sinister neighbour.
Tilda Swinton will appear alongside George Mackay and Michael Shannon in The End, a post-apocalyptic fantasy musical set two decades after an environmental catastrophe about a wealthy family living in luxury in a converted salt mine.


The Return will see Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche play Odysseus and Penelope in director Uberto Pasolini's adaptation of the epic poem The Odyssey, while Lange will star alongside Ed Harris, Ben Foster and Colin Morgan in Long Day's Journey Into Night, an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play.
Ms Gardner will step down in October from her joint role as festival director and chief executive of the charity, which runs the Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT), the event's base, after more than 30 years with the organisation.
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She was co-director of the festival, which she describes as "the best film festival in the world", with Allan Hunter from 2007 until he stood down at the end of the 2023 event.
Ms Gardner has unveiled this year's programme days before she will hear how much Creative Scotland funding the GFT and the festival has for the next three years.


She said she felt it was the right time for new leadership to come in, with the chief executive of Glasgow Film and GFF director expected to become separate roles in future.
"An organisation like ours is built on really solid building blocks, it's not just down to one person,” she said.
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"I'll be here till October to make sure that everything is in place for whoever the new chief executive will be. It feels like my legacy will be quite good. I am in a happy place to leave.


"We’ve submitted a really robust multi-year funding plan to Creative Scotland. It needs a new person to take that forward."
Ms Gardner, who took over the running of Glasgow Film from Jacki McDougall in 2020, said she had not intended to have a "dual role". But she said she decided to stay on as festival co-director due to the prolonged impact of Covid restrictions, which led to the 2021 event going ahead entirely online.
Ms Gardner added: "I was hoping to do the 2021 festival and then pass it on. But I couldn't employ someone to come into an organisation that was essentially in survival mode in those days.
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Hide Ad"We were being fiscally responsible and we were also protecting the staff we already had. We took the decision to do the 2021 event fully online quite early on, before we were put back into lockdown, because I could see the writing on the wall. It was like planning on quicksand at that time.”
The festival attracted more than 6,000 film fans when it launched in 2005 and its audience had expanded to 43,000 by 2020. It has since overtaken the Edinburgh International Film Festival to become “Scotland's biggest celebration of cinema”.
Ms Gardner, a previous programme director at the GFT, said: "We read in a European journal that cities that had film festivals had audiences that went to see a broader range of films throughout the year. We thought 'we'll have some of that for the GFT'.
"We felt it would be a really pro-active audience development initiative and it certainly has been. The GFT's audiences have grown and the festival's audiences have grown. We must have been doing something right.
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Hide Ad"One of our early successes was with our pop-up screenings. We wanted to attract a younger audience through those kind of experiential events.
"They absolutely loved them. I think a lot of people realised the festival was for them. It took away some of the mystique or barriers that might have been there. We know that a lot of those people are now hardened GFF goers and super fans of the festival.
"We always have intellectual and challenging films in the festival, because we cater for that audience, but you've also got to give people routes into the festival so they can have a brilliant time.
"I think it has come back really strongly over the last few years. We've had a really broad range of films, our pricing policy has been pretty good, our programme of free events have been really attractive and we've really worked hard on our ethos of cinema for all.
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Hide Ad"We’re attracting people from really diverse backgrounds. I think that's what makes the GFT the best-attended cinema of its type in the UK, but also what makes the festival so welcoming and friendly."
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