The best new films at the 2019 Glas­gow Film Festival

For its 15^th edi­tion, the 2019 Glas­gow Film Fes­ti­val offered a stacked buf­fet of world, inter­na­tion­al and UK pre­mieres, anniver­sary screen­ings in cre­ative pop-up venues, com­pelling indus­try pan­els, and rich retrospectives.

On the lat­ter front, a full Elaine May ret­ro­spec­tive and the restora­tion of bonkers Japan­ese musi­cal The Leg­end of the Star­dust Broth­ers were among our per­son­al high­lights of this year’s pro­gramme. In terms of the new fea­tures on offer, how­ev­er, the fol­low­ing eight titles rep­re­sent our favourites from a notably strong programme.

This year’s GFF host­ed the world pre­mière of a num­ber of local fea­tures, and Glas­gow-based Matt Pinder’s doc­u­men­tary picked up the festival’s cov­et­ed Audi­ence Award. In 1928, Scot Har­ry Bir­rell was gift­ed his first cine cam­era as a boy. For almost all of his life after that, he record­ed inci­dents minor and major, leav­ing behind a lega­cy of rough­ly 400 film canisters.

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est for Pin­der is Birrell’s per­son­al diaries of his wartime years spent placed in Bur­ma, Bom­bay and Nepal, where he was among the few serv­ing Brits grant­ed access to film­mak­ing equip­ment, includ­ing ear­ly colour film. Although there are some archive news­reels and a fram­ing device with rel­a­tives (includ­ing grand­daugh­ter Cari­na, who also served as co-pro­duc­er), much of the doc­u­men­tary com­pris­es an ener­getic edit of Birrell’s film work, accom­pa­nied by Richard Madden’s nar­ra­tion of Birrell’s diaries – fit­ting­ly, Bir­rell receives a cin­e­matog­ra­phy credit

Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly appeared in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, British cam­paign­er-turned-actor Adam Pear­son, who has neu­rofi­bro­mato­sis, takes cen­tre stage in Aaron Schimberg’s Chained for Life. It’s a light­ly sur­re­al, acer­bic com­e­dy set around the pro­duc­tion of an indie hor­ror which ques­tion­ably deploys dis­fig­ured or dis­abled peo­ple in its sup­port­ing cast.

Indie dar­ling Jess Weixler plays a movie star sup­pos­ed­ly slum­ming it in a low-bud­get schlock piece by a Euro ​‘auteur’ to raise her cred­i­bil­i­ty. She befriends Pearson’s Rosen­thal, the effec­tive lead among the col­lec­tion of ​‘freaks’ pop­u­lat­ing the hos­pi­tal-set hor­ror. Shar­ing its name with a con­joined twin mur­der mys­tery from 1952,

Chained for Life is a meta-inter­ro­ga­tion of sen­si­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion and patro­n­i­sa­tion of the mar­gin­alised in cin­e­mat­ic his­to­ry, with Tod Browning’s Freaks being ref­er­enced on screen to an under­stand­ably high degree. It’s also an amus­ing riff on François Truffaut’s Day for Night, while Schimberg’s unpre­dictable weav­ing between scenes of the film-with­in-the-film, those scenes being shot, and the actors’ on-loca­tion mishaps out­side of the shoot lend it a dis­ori­en­tat­ing atmos­phere rem­i­nis­cent of Peter Strickland’s Berber­ian Sound Studio.

With Her Smell, direc­tor Alex Ross Per­ry has some­how made a great hang­out movie where the cen­tral fig­ure is unbear­able to be around for a major­i­ty of the run­time. This is not an easy film to like – but it may win you over if you get on its wave­length. Its five acts are struc­tured like suites, each oper­at­ing at dif­fer­ent emo­tion­al reg­is­ters, though the first three are very much in a con­sis­tent psych-hor­ror hur­ri­cane mode.

Not to spoil how, but the sec­ond hour even­tu­al­ly set­tles into a more sober, kinder por­trait of its Court­ney Love ana­logue, with Per­ry and Elis­a­beth Moss in the role of Becky Some­thing radi­at­ing sym­pa­thy for the ill­ness­es and addic­tions that can sad­ly some­times seem like a nec­es­sary bur­den for mag­net­ic musi­cians to thrive.

This is far from a one-woman show, though, with Gayle Rankin and Agy­ness Deyn prov­ing the ensemble’s MVPs as Becky’s long-suf­fer­ing band­mates, nev­er quite able to stop lov­ing her even when they hate her – even when they actu­al­ly leave the band over her self-destruc­tive behaviour.

Writer/​director Ash Mayfair’s slow-burn debut fea­ture, The Third Wife, is an empa­thet­ic and entranc­ing dra­ma that fol­lows a 14-year-old girl named May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My), who is mar­ried off to a much old­er rich landown­er in 19^th-cen­tu­ry Viet­nam. Although the plot moves through the sea­sons as May’s cycle of preg­nan­cy pro­gress­es, this is not just her sto­ry, as May­fair also touch­es on and lends sig­nif­i­cant agency to May’s sis­ter-wives on the land.

There are grudg­ing bonds between the women in regards to their shared expe­ri­ences, where there is a sense of com­pe­ti­tion with one anoth­er over becom­ing the favoured spouse by birthing a male heir. In rel­e­gat­ing most of the men in this mul­ti­ple mar­riages nar­ra­tive to the back­ground, favour­ing a focus on the women, the film evokes some­thing of the spir­it of Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern.

May­fair does still have sym­pa­thy for all par­ties involved, though, as the men with the pow­er in these dynam­ics are proven to be just as trapped in this cul­tur­al sys­tem as the women.

Dutch film­mak­er Sacha Polak’s Eng­lish-lan­guage debut fol­lows a young moth­er, Jade, in South Lon­don try­ing to get her life back togeth­er after an acid attack, cour­tesy of her child’s father, scars her face and upper body. The cap­ti­vat­ing first-time per­former Vicky Knight, a real-life burn vic­tim her­self, plays Jade with a seething rage at the cir­cum­stances both in and out of her con­trol, from the mean-spir­it­ed igno­rance pro­ject­ed her way by strangers to her inabil­i­ty to health­ily main­tain rela­tion­ships with her daugh­ter and moth­er (Kather­ine Kelly).

In one of the film’s most intrigu­ing strands, she keeps think­ing of her attack’s per­pe­tra­tor in sex­u­al­ly sug­ges­tive day­dreams, where­in PSTD is entan­gled with residue attrac­tion for the man whose act of vio­lence has irrev­o­ca­bly changed her. The approach to sex­u­al­i­ty and heady style of these sequences in par­tic­u­lar bring to mind both Jane Cam­pi­on and Lynne Ram­say, and the latter’s Morvern Callar also seems a direct influ­ence on Dirty God’s third act departure.

Ho Wi Ding’s Cities of Last Things won the top prize in the Plat­form sec­tion of the 2018 Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val. Among the jurors was South Kore­an film­mak­er Lee Chang-dong, and while it’s not always wise to assume one director’s affin­i­ty for another’s work to be par­tial­ly root­ed in sim­i­lar­i­ties to their own, Malayasian-born Ho’s lat­est has a nar­ra­tive hook and the­mat­ic con­cerns that cer­tain­ly resem­ble Lee’s excel­lent sopho­more fea­ture, Pep­per­mint Candy.

Span­ning sev­er­al decades in reverse chrono­log­i­cal order, this trip­tych doc­u­ments three sig­nif­i­cant events in one man’s life. The open­ing stretch, set in a Philip K Dick-esque dystopia cir­ca 2049, sees Lao Zhang (played as an old­er man by Jack Kao) stalk and mur­der some peo­ple he’s tar­get­ed. The mid­dle sec­tion fol­lows a younger ver­sion of the man (Lee Hong-chi) as a police offi­cer, tak­ing a prin­ci­pled stand against a case of cor­rup­tion in his depart­ment, only for it to back­fire on him. And the final sec­tion fea­tures our lead as a delin­quent youth (Hsieh Chang-Ying), where a chance encounter informs his trag­ic life going forward.

In explor­ing how a soul is cor­rupt­ed through tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty infect­ing one’s envi­ron­ment, Cities of Last Things flirts dan­ger­ous­ly close to arguable misog­y­ny itself on occa­sion. For the most part, though, this is an intel­li­gent, raw and inven­tive per­son­al epic. The moody cin­e­matog­ra­phy, shot almost entire­ly at night on 35mm via DoP Jean-Louis Vialard, is of par­tic­u­lar merit.

Ghas­san Halwani’s exper­i­men­tal debut fea­ture sees the pho­tog­ra­ph­er-turned-illus­tra­tor-turned-film­mak­er employ mul­ti­ple medi­ums, includ­ing text-based inter­ludes, pho­to­jour­nal­ist inter­views, and his own ani­ma­tion, to rumi­nate on the thou­sands of peo­ple who dis­ap­peared dur­ing the Lebanese Civ­il War and the effects their absence still has on the lives of their loved ones.

It serves as both a doc­u­ment of the miss­ing peo­ple and also of Halwani’s attempts, through var­i­ous meth­ods, to uncov­er traces of their lives and exam­ine the dis­ap­pear­ances – to undo any defin­i­tive bur­ial of these souls who have nev­er been heard from again, whose hav­ing exist­ed at all is some­thing seem­ing­ly con­scious­ly erased.

A defin­ing exam­ple of this era­sure comes from a pho­to­graph repeat­ed­ly revis­it­ed through­out the film, where an emp­ty street is shown with no human pres­ence, yet there is a hat in the air and traces of a shoe; the doc­tored pho­to once showed the moment of a kid­nap­ping. This is a bewitch­ing film about how denial and lack of col­lec­tive clo­sure has longterm con­se­quences for a nation.

Leg­endary cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Rob­by Müller, who died in July 2018, inspired film­mak­ers for gen­er­a­tions, col­lab­o­rat­ing with the likes of Wim Wen­ders, Alex Cox, Jim Jar­musch, Bar­bet Schroed­er and Lars von Tri­er. Direc­tor Claire Pij­man was giv­en exten­sive access to his per­son­al archives for her essay film, while Wen­ders, Jar­musch and Claire Denis’ reg­u­lar DoP, Agnès Godard, are among those pay­ing on-screen tribute.

Instead of a tra­di­tion­al biog­ra­phy of the man behind so many icon­ic images, the film presents a scrap­book nar­ra­tive that eschews clear analy­sis of what made Müller’s work so great. It’s a free-asso­cia­tive mosa­ic por­trait that uses clips from Müller’s 70-plus fea­ture cred­its, plus those per­son­al archives, to get at a cer­tain truth about his work and phi­los­o­phy towards images and sto­ry­telling. Müller was guid­ed more by emo­tion than he was con­cerned with the tech­ni­cal aspects of a shot.

Liv­ing the Light caters to those famil­iar with Müller’s most famous fea­tures, but any­one with even a pass­ing knowl­edge of Paris, Texas or Mys­tery Train will like­ly get a kick out of his home movies, which look like they could be insert­ed into those films with rel­a­tive ease. As with the Har­ry Bir­rell film, Müller him­self is cred­it­ed as the cinematographer.