We can now reveal the first films for the 2027 edition of Glasgow Film Festival (GFF), Scotland’s leading international celebration of film, taking place from 24 February to 7 March. We are excited to announce the festival’s Country Focus theme, shining a spotlight on Canadian cinema, as well as our highly anticipated Retrospective Programme, which gives audiences the chance to catch classic films back on the big screen for free.

Audiences can expect to discover standout films and hidden gems from across the global festival circuit inside our home, Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT), Scotland’s original independent cinema.

We will strengthen the festival’s city-centre presence through a new partnership with Omniplex Cinemas, taking over an entire floor of their Renfrew Street venue. With four screens showcasing films from across the programme, the partnership will significantly increase festival capacity and help make the wider Sauchiehall Street Culture and Heritage District an essential destination for film fans during GFF.

Our GFF27 retrospective theme is ‘Somebody’s Watching: Surveillance, Voyeurism and Performance’, featuring a selection of classics from the 1950s to the present day that explore cinema’s unique obsession with watching and being watched. Highlights from the programme include Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 (1984), a chilling vision of authoritarianism; Michelangelo Antonioni’s acclaimed thriller Blow-Up (1966), following a photographer who believes he has captured evidence of a murder; and Richard Linklater’s animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (2006), starring Keanu Reeves in a story of identity and paranoia.

Also screening will be Steven Soderbergh’s acclaimed independent drama Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), exploring intimacy and relationships; and Youssef Chahine’s Egyptian classic Cairo Station (1958), exploring obsession and alienation.

Tickets for the free retrospective titles cannot be booked in advance and are available from GFT Box Office on the morning of the screening. Films shown within the Retrospective Programme may be subject to change, and we are yet to announce the full selection.

GFF27 will be the 23rd edition of the festival, and we will spotlight films from Canada with our Country Focus theme ‘Great Takes: Canadian Cinema’, sponsored by the High Commission of Canada in the United Kingdom and the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation. We will showcase a hand-picked selection at the award-winning festival, including the UK premiere of Leah Nelson’s animated drama Tangles, based on Sarah Leavitt’s graphic novel Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, which explores the impact of Alzheimer’s as a young queer woman returns home to care for her mother. Full of irreverent humour and poignant emotion, the film features a star-studded cast, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston, Seth Rogen, Beanie Feldstein and Sarah Silverman.

Also featured will be The Stunt Driver, a comedy-drama starring Jay Baruchel as real-life daredevil Ken Carter, who attempts a seemingly impossible rocket-car jump across the St. Lawrence River; L’autre, a French Canadian thriller with a touch of Cronenbergian body-horror about a cancer patient recovering from surgery; and A Safe Distance, Gloria Mercer’s debut crime thriller about a woman who befriends a pair of notorious fugitives after being abandoned by her boyfriend in the forest.

We are yet to announce the full selection of Country Focus titles, and tickets will go on sale with the full GFF27 programme in January.

GFF’s Industry Focus is Scotland’s largest conference for film and the wider screen industries, and for 2027 we are adding another valuable opportunity for filmmakers to the programme. Taking place from 1 to 5 March, Industry Focus will feature our first International Co-Production Pitch, a pilot initiative to showcase exciting feature film pitches from filmmakers across the UK and worldwide.

Through the pilot, we welcome submissions from producers worldwide who are seeking a co-producer. We will give selected filmmakers the opportunity to pitch their project to financiers, sales agents, distributors, local and international producers, and other funders at the festival.

Projects must be feature-length and have already secured some finance; this includes development funding. International projects applying to the pitch must be interested in co-producing with the UK.

The pitch will sit within our new Co-Production Day, dedicated to showcasing the benefits of working with producers in Scotland and the rest of the UK. The schedule of events will also spotlight countries outside of the UK, detailing filmmaking opportunities and funding available to visiting productions internationally. We will announce further details along with the full Industry Focus programme on Wednesday 27 January.

GFF has welcomed a host of film stars to the city, including, in recent years, James McAvoy, Toni Collette, Viggo Mortensen, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Tim Roth, Kōki, Lynne Ramsay, Takehiro Hira, Alfred Enoch, Adura Onashile, and Nida Manzoor.

At Glasgow Film, we are a charity that runs GFF, Scotland’s flagship film festival, and also operates Glasgow Film Theatre. Glasgow Film Festival is made possible by support from Screen Scotland, awarding National Lottery funding, and Glasgow Life.

We will announce the full GFF27 programme on Wednesday 20 January.

Press and industry accreditation will open on Wednesday 2 December.