The impressive Hidden Diary
After a spectacular opening night, things felt decidedly more subdued on Friday morning at the Glasgow Film Festival, with few critics or stars braving the early morning screenings, though a small coterie of committed Cary Grant fans still turned up for Bringing Up Baby and Holiday. Hidden Diary, one of the most impressive films I've seen at the festival so far, was screening in the afternoon. It's still looking for a British distributor which is a shame, as I'm sure most Eye For Film readers would enjoy it.
I was pleasantly surprised by She, A Chinese in the evening, having heard mixed views on it previously. It's the first work I've seen by Xiaolu Guo though she's been making quite an impact on the industry, through her speeches as well as her films. Tackling ideas surrounding race, nationality, immigration and aspiration, it brought a fresh perspective to a lot of well-worn notions that other filmmakers seem to approach in the same way over and over again. Some viewers will no doubt be angered by its casual take on prostitution and violence, but it has a strong central female character who never at any point seems compromised.
She, A Chinese was showing in Cineworld, which has this year devoted its entire top floor to the festival - bad news for some attendees who found it scary travelling up and down Glasgow's tallest building in a glass-sided lift. For those in search of more sophisticated excitement there was the launch party of the Short Film Festival in the courtyard at the CCA, where a glass-roofed collection of old tenement buildings looked down on a packed crowd. The event was run by art collective LuckyMe and featured performances by American Men and The Blessings alongside DJ electronica, pop and underground dance. As is often the case at these events there seemed to be copious quantities of free drink - Angastura Carribean rum and Red Bull cola from the sponsors - and the celebrations went on late into the night.
Saturday saw the Short Film Festival get underway in earnest, with venues including a special mobile cinema in Garnethill Park, just up the road from the GFT, where fairground performers exhibited old short films and fragments of films in a carnival atmosphere. New shorts competed for festival awards in CCA 4 whilst CCA 5 hosted Knickerbocker Glory, a great collection of recent animations including my own two favourites this year, the creepy Alma and the haunting Skhizein.
I was in for a creepy film of a different sort, with a special preview of Brett Eisner's take on The Crazies, which the rest of you can see in cinemas at the end of the week. I'm not allowed to say much about it here because Momentum have it under embargo, but I did find it a lot of fun, and I thought it did a good job of exploring some of the underlying themes of Romero's original without compromising its own distinctive character. You can read my full review on the 25th.
The Crazies is, in large part, a film about paranoia, a film in which one always has to wonder if the protagonists are being silently observed, so perhaps Momentum thought it quite appropriate to put guys with night vision goggles in the cinema to spy on the rest of us, but I have to say I think it was a bit out of order to announce that people would be summarily thrown out if they used any electronic devices at all. No looking at one's phone to check the time, then, even if one has been drinking tea in the office all afternoon and needs to know whether one should duck out quickly to pee or hold on until the end. This is not the way to win friends and influence people. I couldn't help but wonder what would have happened to someone with an electronic pacemaker.
Stuart spent the evening in the Classic Grand at another of the Music And Film strand events, a special live performance by cult arstists / musicians Pere Ubu. Describing them as "a bit mental", he remarked that nobody seemed to know what was going on, and at times he wondered if they knew what country they were in as they made reference to English sports stars. The show seemed to be "vaguely about Russia and Poland", though it claimed to be a retelling of Macbeth, and involved people shouting at each other with occasional music in the background. The venue was packed, though, and people seemed to have a good time.
There are plenty of good times to come, with the Surprise Movie and today's James Earl Jones talk now sold out but lots of other fun events still accessible. We'll continue to keep you up to date right here.
