Glasgow Film Festival’s CEO Allison Gardner on her last year running the event and 2025’s programme

Glasgow Film Festival is returning next month for its 2025 edition, with a full programme of cinema, created in Scotland and across the world.

Transcript

00:00I'm Alison Gardner, I'm the CEO of Glasgow Film and the director of Glasgow Film Festival.

00:04We started as a duty manager in 1993 and worked my way up and I'm leaving because it's time for

00:15somebody else to take it through its next 10-year plan. I became the CEO on the 1st of April 2020

00:21during lockdown, which was not a very good time for cinemas, so it was a challenging five years

00:27and keeping it going, but we've got a great team here and so the organisation as a whole is a

00:34bigger entity than one person, so it's time for me to move on and do some fun stuff.

00:39The audiences have been the best thing, people love letting us know what they like and what

00:43they don't like. Glasgow audience is not backwards and coming forwards and it's just lovely to hear

00:48people what they love, the films that have changed their lives and film does change your life,

00:54it makes things better. They're very knowledgeable about cinema and that's a huge benefit,

01:00they're very cinephilic, they like to ask questions, our guests have said to us,

01:04God your audience are great at questions. Viggo Mortensen was here last year for his film Dead

01:09the Dead Don't Hurt and he was like, your audiences are really clever and I was like,

01:12yes, it's taken me years to train them Viggo, years to train them, so the audiences know what

01:18they want to get out of it, so I think that what you need to do is try and present them with as

01:24many opportunities to see different stuff and strands and focuses and the audience award films,

01:31supporting those emerging talents I think is important, because it's really hard to make a

01:35film, it's really difficult, it's not an easy job and I don't mean just physically the job,

01:39being the director, which is all of the job, but that takes a huge community of people to put a

01:43film together, so you need to make sure that that is in front of an audience so they can appreciate

01:47that. Our opening gala is Tornado, which is great, really, really, really good story, survival,

01:54thriller, it's an absolutely fantastic world premiere, shot by John McClane, I would urge

02:00you to watch his first film Slow West, which is also brilliant as well, so we're delighted to

02:05have the world premiere of that, it's going to open in cinemas on the 23rd of May and then we're

02:10closing with a particularly Scottish story, Make it to Munich, it's the story of a young man who

02:16was hit by a car and how it's a very Scottish story, he's Scottish, he travels to present the

02:22pennant at the Scotland-German game, I mean what I know about football is zero, but the film itself

02:29is a really interesting journey of that, his journey, both physical journey to the Euros,

02:35but also journey within himself to help him heal himself as well and it's really heartwarming,

02:41so we're really delighted to have a world premiere bookending the festival opening and closing.