The 2015 Glasgow Film Festival kicks in to action today, and what a treat it promises to be. For the next fortnight with films, gigs and events from Bergman to Burroughs, Casablanca to cat videos, The Tales of Hoffmann to Talking Heads, and (almost) everything in between.
Regular readers will know we're big fans of Mario Bava; FrightFest and the GFF have had the good sense to team up in order show his classic horror thriller Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l'assassino) ahead of Arrow FIlms' reissue of it on Blu Ray and DVD in April. From a master of horror to a horror debut, Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is certainly one of the most intriguing films in the whole programme - a monochrome love story set in a (fictitious) Iranian ghost town terrorised by a hijab-wearing female vampire, reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch. If that doesn't pique your interest, nothing will. And speaking of him, even David Lynch would probably have rather seen Jodorowsky's take on Dune in the end - no-one ever will of course, but Jodorowsky's Dune promises the next best thing with an insight into how the Chilean psychonaut would have fitted Salvador Dalí, H.R. Giger, Orson Welles and Pink Floyd into the Frank Herbert epic.
As ever, there's a musical thread (Sound & Vision) running through this year's festival - British Sea Power perform their score to From the Sea to the Land Beyond at A Night at the Regal, a tribute to the O2 ABC's former existence as a cinema, that also features Monoganon and eagleowl performing to film and video, and a collaboration between 20,000 Days on Earth directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and _Linden's Joe McAlinden. There's also a screening of the classic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense as a part of the Monorail Film Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher is being shown with a live score at Pollokshaws Burgh Hall (a sequel of sorts to the utterly jaw-dropping Passion of Joan of Arc event at Glasgow Cathedral which we had the pleasure of attending at the festival in 2013).
There are too many other highlights to mention them all but we're especially looking forward to Swedish tragicomic surrealist Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders (follow-up to her wonderful debut feature, Corpo Celeste).
The Glasgow Film Festival 2015 has its opening gala tonight and finishes on 1 March.