Glasgow Film Festival celebrated its highest ever attendance, with more than 43,000 admissions. In addition to the 43,147 attending screenings and events across the city (up from 42,224 in 2019), over 3000 people attended the first ever UK exhibition of work by legendary Hollywood photographer Susan Wood. The exhibition ran throughout the festival at The Lighthouse.
GFF20 finished in style on Sunday night with the UK premiere of How To Build A Girl, the big screen adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s memoir which was directed by Coky Giedroyc. Moran and Giedroyc were both in attendance. This year the festival also played host to a number of guests including Simon Pegg, George Mackay, Earl Cave, Simon Bird, Monica Dolan, Emily Beecham, Imogen Poots, Celia Imrie, Bill Paterson, Alice Winocour and the cast of Our Ladies. International guests included Marjane Satrapi and Ingvar Sigurðsson.
GFF closed on International Women’s Day (IWD) with a programme dedicated to female talent both behind and in front of the camera. A number of filmmakers came to celebrate IWD at the festival with their films including Sarah Gavron with Rocks; Saudi Arabia’s first female film director Haifaa Al-Mansour with her new film The Perfect Candidate; and the new feature from 2017 Glasgow Film Festival Audience Award winner Alankrita Shrivastava: Dolly Kitty and Those Twinkling Stars.
The winner of the GFF 2020 Audience Award, sponsored by Caledonian MacBrayne, was announced last night as Arracht – Tom Sullivan’s Irish Gaelic thriller evoking the desperate times of the 1840s Potato Famine. The Audience Award is the only prize handed out by GFF and is voted for by the film festival audiences.
