In advance of their show this month, Glasgow based sound/art/performance collective 85A talked to Central Station about Cargo, Camera…Action!…

In a video about Cargo, Camera…Action! Dom Hastings describes the art scene in Glasgow as “DIY & grassroots.” How would you describe it?

There isn’t so much commercial presentation in Glasgow. There’s only really two commercial galleries. I’m sure a lot of artists would like to have more opportunities in that way, but for us it becomes more of a breeding ground for different artists getting together to create different types of events, heavily inspired from the music and arts scenes mixing.

It’s a way of getting things done and learning from each other, even from other people’s mistakes. There’s such a huge arts community with loads of people doing things and that’s really inspiring. Even if you’re not necessarily part of it, you’re friends with everyone and there’s a supportive community in what you’re trying to do.

Cargo, Camera…Action – Photo: Eoin Carey

How did the collaboration with Glasgow Film come about?

The first collaboration was Jan Švankmajer for the Glasgow Film Festival in 2013 at the closing party. Glasgow Film approached us. That was the first official commission that we did. It was a matinee to an evening performance with ten mini-cinemas in it. We were screening Švankmajer’s early animations, his short films and made an immersive environment that people could walk around in. It was a mixture between more focused theatrical sit-down performances and then just stuff that you could stumble upon. Everything was bespoke to the film and we responded to his films to create a cinema environment.

The audience had to interact with the performance, for example if they wanted to watch this one film they had to be led around by a grim reaper with a chain. You had to go to a restaurant and book your table and when you got served there was a big slab of meat with a screen in it. It brought a new audience to Švankmajer as well as bringing out the older audience. Those films are nearly twenty-five years old so we were bringing the Surrealist out from under the rug and mixing the visual arts and film audiences.

From there, they approached us. We also had some ideas about doing something for the Commonwealth. The commission came about from that, from being on the scene and doing lots of film-based works. Their brief for the commission, was to transform underused locations along the River Clyde and make them into bespoke cinemas. That’s what we’ve done consistently; take over disused spaces and make them into cinemas.

85A & GFF present Jan-Svankmajer – Photo: Neil-Davison

So if you could use any disused space in the world what would it be?

Chernobyl? There’s a few spaces in Glasgow we’ve got our eye on discovering. We don’t necessarily go out looking for spaces. Usually, something finds us. Either we stumble across a space and we all respond to it or someone gives us a space. Things are corrupt, decayed, industrial. When we’ve been asked to do something, like recently with Dark Behaviour in the Arches in a nice space, the first thing we do is go ‘where’s the rubbish, where’s the stuff?’ We make a space look messy. There’s not really any shortage of places like this. We’re quite easy on the requirements and pre-requisites.

Last year, we made ourselves a community interest company. That means we’re able to go to businesses and parks and ask for disused warehouses and are able to get rates relief. It’s a good deal because there’s an exchange which isn’t monetary. The more people that go in there, the more it keeps the place alive a little bit instead of this massive space sitting empty. That’s Glasgow, isn’t it? You just get given spaces if you start looking! We’ve never paid for a space ever and that’s been ten years of working in buildings.

How do you go about creating a performance? What’s your creative process like?

Torturous! We have brainstorming meetings and drawing sessions at the very start. It’s all heads together and then we maybe naturally split off and develop things and bring them back to the group constantly. Because we are unfunded and most of our work is commission based, we have to apply to make work. So we have to devise an answer to a brief and come up with something before it gets made and get the concept sketch. It’s accepted, if you’re lucky and then we decide to do something totally different!

It would be pure luxury to have paid rehearsal times throughout the year for different things, but it just doesn’t work like that. It comes together in a more organic way of whoever is working with whoever and creating something. Life is the stage. We get paid from our other jobs.

A lot of things start as casual conversations between a couple of people and then it’s just like ‘ that’s an amazing idea!’ and you get a call ‘ alright, we’re going to do it like this!’ It has been a real treat over the last few months, we’ve got a studio, an HQ with a rehearsal space and a warehouse. It’s where we will build our stage; a full-scale 20 metre deep, 20 metre wide stage. We can practice all the kinetic elements on set and with all the props. With the show, we’re effectively performing it five times in one day and we’ve got different music acts for each one. There will be a tempo change within that so we’re going to bring the musicians in to do rehearsals.

With such large performance elements, how do you go about rehearsing?

In Glasgow we’re blessed with big living rooms and big bedrooms. So we work like this or we work on site when we’ve built the show. On one occasion we had the workspace in The Glue Factory one week prior to the show. Right towards the end you can find a space somewhere.

Cargo, Camera…Action – Photo: Eoin Carey

What should audiences expect from Cargo, Camera…Action?

They’re totally vital to the performance. If they don’t show up, the film is not going to be complete! We’re filming the last scenes of a film that we’re making and they’re the extras of the film. They’ll have some quite important jobs to do in making the film resonate and come to life. They should expect lots of music.

It’s a promenade experience with a café and the backstage crew bar, but really since the audience are the extras, it’s for them. It’s an all day wrap party. There’s talent scouts and mobile make-up station to prepare our extras. Then they’ll come for the shoot and they’ll have to do what the director says.

We stumbled across an article in the Scotsman back in February with the title ‘Cannibal Rats in Ghost Ship head to Scotland.’ This is the film that we’re shooting the final scenes of. We’re making a big cargo set. We’ve got cannibal rats.

85A & Glasgow Film Cargo, Camera, Action! Launch Event.

Durational performances are quite long, what are some of the challenges you face when performing?

Not enough hours in the day and not enough energy drinks to go around. It’s like giving birth, really tough at the time but afterwards you forget how hard it was and you look at what you’ve created. That’s what theatre and live performances are. It’s the adrenaline people feed off. A lot of it is down to the people that come to work with us as well. It’s not for the faint-hearted!

The real challenge is making a living in between shows. Once we get to the point where there’s a week until the show, we’re in familiar territory. With a long lead-in like this one has, it’s making sure that you can be available to do the work and the devising can be tough as well. As we’re getting more established and recognised, there’s an expectation that we need to come up with another good show. Then there’s pressure and the dynamics of a big group. It’s the big family syndrome of all of us trying to get along with each other and be fulfilled creatively. As you grow or become more recognised, there are challenges that come with that; making new work together whilst maintaining an income.

Cargo, Camera…Action! is our biggest show to date in a lot of different ways. We like to make it so that each person who comes to our shows has a good seat. When you go to these big events and there’s an aerial performer 200 feet away from you and this massive crowd, you feel like nobody. That’s why we’re doing the same show five times instead of doing it just once because then everybody is going to get a good seat.

We’ve taken down the amphitheatre’s capacity quite considerably to make it more intimate. This has always been so important throughout the history of all of our work. Our cast for this show is up to thirty. So it’s thirty to three hundred. We think that’s a good ratio. People call us mad for this, saying that it won’t last, that it isn’t sustainable. We think that’s what makes this special.

See 85A in Cargo, Camera…Action! on 26 July at the Clyde Amphitheatre. The event is free but some parts of the events are ticketed. For more information see the Glasgow Film website.  For more Cargo, Camera…Action! see our featured event. Want more 85A? Read our first Q&A with them here.

Photos courtesy of 85A and Glasgow Film. Interview by Madeleine Schmoll.

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Jenny Judova is founder of Art Map London, an art event listings website for the capital that is here to revolutionise the London art scene. What started as a small venture in late 2013 has now been outstripped by demand. Judova decided to launch a Kickstarter to fund a newly developed website. Fully-funded and a staff-pick after only a week on Kickstarter, it’s clear there is a need to make private views and events more accessible. Here, she takes some time to talk to us about Art Map London…

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I am an alumna of Glasgow University, I did both my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees there. The undergraduate degree was a joint honours in History of Art and Theology and Religious studies, and the postgraduate degree was a 12 month research into the representation of the Devil in the Queen Mary psalter, an early 14th century English manuscript. So something centuries away from contemporary art, but I think my affection for monsters and imps does shine through.

Founder Jenny Judova with ’Astro Monkey’ by Adam Slatter. Acrylic on canvas.

What is Art Map London?

Art Map London is an art event listings website for London. We list everything from private views to screenings to talks as long as they are open to the general public, and it is events based, so we do not list exhibitions. In other words, if you are searching for art and a free drink, Art Map London will tell you where to find them.

How did you come up with the idea for the project?

It was Glasgow inspired. Glasgow has a very strong private view culture, if you are studying art (especially if you are at GSA) you go to art openings. Third year private views just became my monthly routine and when I moved to London I spent weeks trying to find a private view listing website, or zine, or blog or whatever, but there was nothing. There are loads of maps that would show the locations of galleries and there are tons of generic exhibition listing websites. So after a month of not going to art events, I realised that if I want to keep my habits I have to create a listing website – and I did.

Currently, you’re looking to expand the website with a photo diary and a gallery directory. What is your long-term vision for the site?

I do see Art Map becoming the one-stop shop for all art events in London, and all gallery information. The long term vision is to use Art Map to demystify galleries and private views – to empower people who ‘don’t know anything about art’ to go to galleries and to be confident to look at art, judge it, and collect it.

What makes the London art scene stand out from other cities?

Diversity. Glasgow is new and experimental; New York is trendy and cool and polished, Paris is old fashioned and institutional, London is diverse. In London, you can find anything from the outrageously experimental exhibitions to the stick up your arse polite ones. You have galleries and curators who are all about research, and those who are all about slamming art on the wall and making money. In London, you can find something for any taste and any pocket.

Do you think there are any misconceptions about the accessibility of private views and gallery openings?

Yes, and that is one of the reasons why I started Art Map – to fight against those ridiculous assumptions and to empower people to judge art, because even if you do not have an arts degree, you are still entitled to have an opinion on whether you like the art work or you don’t. There are a number of ridiculous misconceptions, the two most widespread are: that you have to be invited or on ‘the guest list’ to come to a private view, which is rarely the case. And the second is that you will be questioned about art – which never happens, if anything a private view is the place where art is used as a conversation starter rather than the subject.

Monster Private View – Lara Thomson

You’ve teamed up with several artists to provide art rewards to your backers, can you tell us more about how you came to work with them and how you settled on the theme of ‘monster’?

From the start I wanted to work with artists, Art Map is about exploring the London art scene, especially the emerging art scene. So it made perfect sense to approach artists to have their work as awards rather than generic merchandise with the Art Map logo. I never really picked a theme for the Kickstarter I just wanted to work with artists whose art I admired, and whose work I would want to collect. That is actually how I met Cassandra Yap – I bought one of her prints. I came across Benjamin Bridges and Guy Haddon Grant when procrastinating online. Ben introduced me to Lara Thomson, and I fell in love with her monsters. I met Garry Russell in a bizarre way – a friend bumped into him in Selfridges – and the rest is history, and Adam Slatter was introduced to me by Garry.

I was very fortunate that all the artists agreed to take part in my campaign and gave me their existing works. Everyone apart from Lara, she created the Monster Private View print for the Kickstarter campaign. The Monster Private View is a detailed study of characters you meet at art events, and I like to think that the little guy with the map is me. The print is available for 50, and a limited number of prints will be available for only 25 via the Kickstarter. I believe that a collection speaks a lot about the collector, so in the case of the Kickstarter; the theme monster was not chosen I just happen to like monsters.

Kickstarter artists clockwise from the top: Adam Slatter, Guy Haddon Grant, Gary Russell, Lara Thomson and Art Map London founder, Jenny Judova.

Why did you choose to use crowd funding for this project?

Art Map is for everyone, not just for specialist public, and it made sense to crowd fund the project to check if the public actually wanted and needed it. Out of all the confounding platforms, I chose Kickstarter because I am most familiar with it – I’ve used it for a few years now.

What place do you think crowd funding has in the art world?

Unfortunately very little.

I find it a bit tragic that Kickstarter actually started out with an ambition to help artists and culture projects, but now it is best known for tech projects. Tech and digital campaigns are also more successful in gaining funding than art projects. Usually because they are better at researching how to create a successful campaign, and they are better at promoting it. One of the things that the panel discussion ‘Art projects on Kickstarter’, which I held, brought to light is that promotion is often key to success and should become a full time job if you want to get the funds. And now speaking from experience, I can confirm that it is true. The hardest work begins the second you launch your Kickstarter – I spent the last week chained to the computer and that is why Art Map is 92% funded in a week!

Art Map London Kickstarter Video

What advice would you give to young creatives and artists who are thinking of organising a crowd funding campaign?

Research. Research the platform, talk to people who went through it, do not jump into it, leave at least a month for preparation. I’ve seen great projects fail just because their founders did not bother to spend time on preparation and research and expected the Kickstarter community to throw money at them. And I’ve seen the most idiotic ideas funded because their project leaders were smart with awards and pledges, took full advantage of the video, and were good at promoting the campaign.

Crowdfunding is great, but it is definitely not a lazy man’s/woman’s alternative to government funding.

Art Map London is live on Kickstarter until 3 July. Having reached its funding goal, the project will continue to collect funds until its closing date. See how the campaign is doing here. Learn more about the artists involved in the special exhibition catalogue below:

Read more about the artists whose work is featured in the Art Map London Kickstarter campaign.

Photos courtesy of Jenny Judova. Q&A by Madeleine Schmoll.

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I recently spent two and a half days in Lyon, France exploring the Nuits Sonores Festival where my film, Cinema City was showing as part of a Glasgow based film programme. Below, are some of my observations.

Since the 1990s, the Confluence quarter of Lyon has undergone a massive redevelopment from its heavily industrial past. Located on a peninsula where the Rhône and Saône meet, what was once a base for the wholesale markets of the city is now an area full of architecturally unique offices, flats and an upscale mall. However quick the change, there are still traces of the old Confluence. It is here that Nuits Sonores began.

Confluence Quarter

Hôtel de Région

For the past ten years, the Confluence quarter has played host to this festival, billing itself as dedicated to “electronic, independent music and digital culture where music, design, graphic arts and architecture are closely related”. Within the last four years, the festival has also added a daytime programme of conferences, workshops, meetings, screenings and showcases geared towards industry professionals called the European Lab.

The European Lab finds itself in the highly-modern Hôtel de Région, a gargantuan building of wood and glass with a stunningly beautiful atrium. Suspended above is an installation created for the festival by Vincent Leroy entitled Auréole Boréale which oscillates gently.

Auréole Boréale by Vincent Leroy

Ultra-modern conference rooms play host to four days of events focusing on cultural policies, social change, culture and the city of tomorrow, media entrepreneurship and new cultural practice, music practice and innovation. It’s a whirlwind of highly-organised and exceedingly well-structured events in different formats featuring speakers from around Europe. Helpfully, there’s simultaneous interpretation for non-French speakers.

I spent day three of the conference learning about cultural incubators, new media and cultural change. The highlight was the talk about cultural European incubators which featured a panel of speakers from France, Serbia, Sweden, Slovakia, and the UK. Learning about how to create opportunities for cultural entrepreneurs and what challenges needed to be faced was exciting. For me, it really reinforced the idea behind the European Lab, “connecting cultural change-makers.”

With guest of the day speakers such as Agnès B., Bruce Sterling, Alain Damasio and Michel Gondry, placed next to industry heavyweights like Nicolas Demorand of Libération and television journalist, John-Paul Lepers, it really felt like these cultural discussions could be a catalyst for something larger.

Conference: Culture within a changing media landscape

I found myself in Lyon as part of another strand that’s become a part of the festival over the past years, the Carte Blanche programme. Nuits Sonores selects a city and creates a programme of music, urban history and art which feature prominently in the festival. Having featured London in 2009 and Manchester in 2005, this year it was Glasgow’s turn.

Halle aux Fleurs

The festival created a cinema in the Halle aux Fleurs, an old flower market which still bears the electric signage required for bidding on lots of flowers in francs. It’s a Brutalist structure from the 1960s brightened up with colourful pops of wallpaper and the sort of furniture that can only be described as granny chic. With a promotional lighting display from Philips, it was a strange mishmash of new and old with a hipster coffee cart thrown in the mix.

Ciné Glasgow in the Halle aux Fleurs

In the slightly more spartan cinema, wireless headsets allowed for free movement throughout the space, giving viewers the chance to clamber up into the former bidding seats, or to remain below and gaze up at the suspended screen.

Ciné Glasgow

The cinema, Ciné Glasgow, featured a continuous screening of different programmes of films about Glasgow including: Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Louise Ann and William Thomson,1965), a Vox Pop from Arte about cultural regeneration, a selection of work from the Glasgow Short Film Festival (curated by Matt Lloyd) and many more (including my own film).

Maison de la Confluence

Across the way from the cinema in La Halle, is the Maison de la Confluence, an outdoor space with a laid-back vibe that played host to many of the music events in the Glasgow programme. In addition to live sets from Optimo, Golden Teacher, Kode9, and Martyn Flyn, there were food trucks, drinks, and loads of pallets for a relaxing lounge in the sun before the evening programmes got underway.

There’s a reason Lyon’s symbol is that of a lion. As I climbed aboard a packed tram full of raucous festival goers heading to the Confluence quarter on the first night of the festival, it became clear that Lyon is a city of lions who roar loudly. It’s not unlike throbbing bass of the main events of Nuits Sonores, which start after ten and stop just before five in the morning.

These events take place at the Ancien Marché de Gros, an old wholesale market and the original base of the festival. The venue is home to three stages and some of the biggest events of Nuits Sonores. Featuring music by Jackmaster, Four Tet, Kraftwerk and more, these night performances are highly in demand with massive crowds of discerning music lovers turning out in full force for several evenings of all-night partying.

Just a few hours from Paris by high-speed train, both Lyon and Nuits Sonores have a lot to offer. With glorious summer weather in May, and a diverse range of events, this festival is certainly one to watch. For more information about Nuits Sonores, check out the festival website.

For more from Madeleine, check out her My Creative Scene about Paris.

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Paris is a city about which most everyone has an opinion. And if you’ve been, and you’ve liked it, you more than likely have a few favourite places that aren’t necessarily a part of most visitors standard repertoires. My favourite Paris is the everyday Paris, with its markets and the small intricacies of daily life that mark each arrondissement. Having spent a formative part of my life in the 4th arrondissement, better known as Le Marais, I know I’m home when I see a family of Hasidic Jews on their way home from the shul passing by a gay couple on their way out for the night.

As much as I try to capture these small moments in writing and occasionally on film, I realise that I am not the first to attempt such a feat. I’m inspired by photographers such as August Sander, Eugène Atget and Brassaï whose work documents the everyday extraordinarily. Their work has a certain universality in its grasp of human emotion and curiosity about the places we inhabit. While the neighbourhoods these artists worked in have changed, similar moments are still there waiting to be captured.

When I was last home, I spent the weekend immersed in photography from the early 1900s. I was most excited about the Musée Albert Kahn, a museum that I stumbled across in my Facebook  newsfeed that had colour photographs from the 1920s. It seemed like an unusual concept and was in a part of Paris I wasn’t particularly familiar with. I already had plans to see the Brassaï exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville and with just over forty-eight hours, I also hoped to get to the Maison Européenne de la Photographie to see the David Lynch exhibition Small Stories. All of this and the usual cafe-hopping and catching up with family! Below are some impressions of the weekend:

Musée Albert Kahn:

The Musée Albert Kahn focuses on the photographic commissions and contributions of the philanthropic and well-travelled Albert Kahn. Located just outside of Paris in Boulogne, the museums sits on the site of Kahn’s mansion and former estate. Although the house no longer exists, the museum has preserved the grounds which include a series of different gardens that cover an astonishing four hectares.

Originally from Alsace, Kahn was born in 1860. He made a large fortune through banking and was a staunch pacifist. In his goal to promote harmony and tolerance, he also became an avid documentarist. His goal to create the Archives de la Planète (Archives of the Planet) and document the world through photography, resulted in the creation of over 72,000 colour autochromes that are astoundingly comprehensive in their gaze of life in the early 1900s.

Kahn’s autochromes delve into the discoveries of the past in the heyday of colonialism, exploring the world from Antarctica to Africa and then turning the gaze back on World War I Europe. The collection of formal portraits reads like a who’s who of the times. Nobel prize winners, heads of state, writers and contemporaries such as Auguste Rodin and Rabindranath Tagore appear next to close family friends and the photographers that carried out his work. It is this juxtaposition of everyday life, the houses, children, gardens and villages of the world, that along with the more formal portraits, create a compelling archive that is not only of exceptional cultural value but also introspective in its examination of humankind. It’s a truly mesmerising way to spend an hour or two, wondering about the stories behind the photos and admiring compositions that are so clear that it’s hard to believe they were taken over a hundred years ago.

Hôtel de Ville – Brassaï: For the Love of Paris:

Exhibition runs until 29 March

Covering several different bodies of work, Brassaï’s ‘For the Love of Paris‘ exhibition spans nearly fifty years of work. His photographs were some of the first I saw when my family moved to Paris. It seems funny to me now, that I should admire the work of someone for whom Paris was also an adopted city. I think there’s something to be said for trying to document a place you aren’t originally from.

Brassaï’s work is appealing on many levels. His voyeuristic gaze draws you into the shadows of  smoky clubs, cafés and brothels. It’s a view that is far from detached. These photos are intimate, as if at any moment, one of the subjects might turn around and say something. In Chez Suzy (1932), a topless woman stands in front of a gilt mirror looking downwards, her face obscured by the sweep of her dark bobbed hair, looking as if she’s about to turn to face the camera.  It’s these images where you sometimes find yourself nearly holding your breath, waiting, convinced that you might soon see their faces and hear their words.

It isn’t so much that Brassaï captures the margins of his world, so much as that he appears to capture the moments everyone else was too impatient to wait for. These photos have a comforting universality, a feeling that in less than a hundred years there are still some things that have remained the same. Somewhere between bygone eras of the Follie Bergère and mauvais garçons (bad boys), there are still people drinking and dancing, kissing on darkened streets, and etching their names and other pictograms onto walls. Brassaï’s work captures the extraordinary in the everyday. Undisturbed fresh snow on a row of chairs in a public park has the appearance of having made a downy white cushion upon which to sit in Chairs in the Luxembourg Gardens (1947).  In another series, Brassaï photographs wet cobblestones in the night. In Cobblestones (1931-1932), it’s the texture and luminescence of the stones that pull the gaze, the notion that although you may have walked this way thousands of times that you still never quite saw it this way. Or, that perhaps, you simply never noticed at all.

Maison Européenne de la Photographie – David Lynch ”Small Stories:”

Exhibition runs until 16 March

Perhaps this is why I found the David Lynch’s Small Stories exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie so jarring. Grainy black and white images with superimposed figures were numbered and given the same vague titles. There were stories there too, realities that were equally fabricated but somehow not quite as compelling or as evocative of the Paris I had just spent most of the weekend looking at. And since I couldn’t really think of very many nice things to say, there was a resolution to flee the universe of David Lynch and return to the streets of the Marais for lunch in a café. Ensconced in the Parisian equivalent of a local, with bustling waiters, paper tablecloths, rickety wooden chairs and a pichet of red wine to go with lunch, I found myself silently reaffirming just how much I love this city.

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The tenth annual Glasgow Film Festival launches today with the sold out opening gala, The Grand Budapest Hotel. From cherishing the lost and celebrating the past, to embracing the new and the sometimes strange, the festival truly embraces the philosophy of ‘cinema for all.’ With a series of unique pop-up programmes and collaborations, alongside talks and masterclasses, the hardest decision is what to book first.

With an emphasis on the legacy of Scottish filmmaking, the Great Scots strand firmly straddles the past and present. Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (22 February) serves as part of a day of screenings that promote Shetland. With a soundtrack by Iain Cook of CHVRCHES, Robert Florence’s The House of Him (22 February) showcases new Scottish talent in a horror film debut shot over sixteen days in Glasgow. Laurence Henson’s Documenting John Grierson (28 February & 1 March) rounds out the programme, promising an introspective gaze at the father of modern documentary.

Still from Rachel Maclean’s A Whole New World

Celebrating the crossover between film and visual art, the Crossing the Line strand embraces bold new work. The UK premiere of Man of Steel (25 February), features critically acclaimed Ed Atkins’ moving image works and their examination of memory and digital media. 2013 Margaret Tait Award winner, Rachel Maclean presents her film, A Whole New World (24.02) where she explores the notion of being ‘British’ and the legacy of imperialism in the ruins of what once was. Heading in the other direction, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (23 February) delves into the possibilities of finding utopia.

In the Out of the Past strand, River Phoenix makes his final appearance in Dark Blood, (24 February) the unfinished George Sluizer film. Sluizer, who will be in attendance, will narrate the missing scenes. Another gem, the once lost Black Angel (27 February), makes a reappearance along with the a Q&A with director Roger Christian. Shot around Scotland in Cinemascope, and funded by George Lucas, the film is the story of a knight who dares to rescue a damsel in distress.

Still from Between Weathers part of Nort Atlantik Drift: A Day of Shetland

Glasgow band Admiral Fallow have programmed an evening at the Old Fruitmarket as part of the Music and Film Festival. We Are Ten (1 March) includes new music and bespoke visual content that references Glasgow’s Cinema City past. Also in the Music and Film Festival, looking overseas to a city much like Glasgow is Julien Temple’s Requiem for Detroit? (28 February) which examines the new found place of art and music in the present-day Motor City. Paired with a live set from techno producer Carl Craig, this fascinating collaboration is not to be missed.

The State of Independents strand features new independent American talent that is not only highly original but deeply intimate. James E. Duff’s Hank and Asha (22.02) is a long-distance video-letter love story and serves as the bright foil to Michael Z Wechsler’s dark and tenuous family drama The Red Robin (27 & 28 February).

Between the superhero cinema of the Kapow! strand and the can’t-sleep-with-the-lights-out Fright-Fest offerings, there’s Hollywood nostalgia and a carefully curated selection of some of the best and newest European and World cinema. Whether it’s video games strand Game Cats go Miaow! or the promise of new Chilean film talent, there’s no reason to hesitate. Book now!

The festival runs from 20 February to 2 March. For the full programme visit the GFT’s website.

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The Glasgow Short Film Festival launches tomorrow. Covering four days this year, the festival offers thirty new Scottish films in its Scottish Short Film Competition and thirty-four films vying for the Bill Douglas Award for International Short Film. There are numerous programmes ranging from Irish film to Queer Russian cinema alongside a series of talks, special events and a Low Budget VFX workshop.

But what to see? Matt Lloyd, the festival director took some time to highlight some of the must-sees this year. Focusing on the relationship between film and music, this year’s festival begins to blur the lines between the two. “Short film is a medium able to explore more interpersonal relationships with sound and music..[which is] used not only to support characters but in more interesting ways”. The festival’s opening performance and world premiere, PULSE draws upon this pairing. Featuring Grammy-nominated British/Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova and Scottish filmmaker Ruth Paxton, the event is a fusion of live music and short film that is not to be missed.

With so many films to see, the question that comes to mind is how exactly does a festival programmer choose such a wide variety of films? Lloyd compares it to putting together a mixtape, “Anyone can do it. You need variety but you also have to see the connections between films without allowing too much repetition”. However as anyone who has tried to make a mixtape knows, a lot of effort goes into making something that has depth, range and flow. With his distinctively bold style, Lloyd continues to drive the Glasgow Short Film Festival forward with innovative events and a blend of new talent from Scotland and beyond.

The first of Lloyd’s recommendations comes from Scotland. Screening as part of both the Scottish and International competitions is Cara Connolly and Martin Clark’s Exchange & Mart. After debuting at Sundance and showing at Berlin, the Scottish film comes to Glasgow for its UK premiere. “It’s a strong mature work for a fiction debut that deals with isolation and the need for human contact- it’s got a lot of talent,” says Lloyd.

Looking forwards towards September’s referendum is a panel entitled ‘Independence and the Scottish Film Industry.’ Focusing less on posturing and more on discussion, the session will examine just what the effects of nationhood might have on Scottish film culture. Inspired by a casual question from a colleague, Lloyd says “I have no idea what’s going to happen and that’s exciting.”

In the international competition, Lloyd recommends On the Threshold (Sto katofli), a Greek film. “It has the steady deliberateness of recent Greek features which blends with the anger coming out of Greece at the moment.” Equally promising is Robin McKay’s international premiere of How to Abandon Ship, an American animation and live-action film about relationships that is in the words of Lloyd, “ both funny and heart-wrenching.”

Finally, not to be missed are festival guests Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva. Mayer, a visual artist and Leyva, a playwright both based in Miami, will present a series of films that “defy classification” in their first ever international setting. If Indiewire calls them “next great hope of American Film,” Lloyd’s suggestion that these are “ones to watch” should be heeded.

The festival runs from the 13-16 February at various venues around Glasgow. For the full programme click here.

Interview by Madeleine Schmoll

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