We pick out ten films to watch at

Fire Murina Nobody Has to Know

The Girl and the Spider The Hermit of Trig The Worst Person in the World

Pic ‘n’ Mix

Exciting Scottish talent and internationally renowned directors rub shoulders at the latest edition of the Glasgow Film Festival. Stories of gallus imposters, smouldering love triangles and heartbreaking romances are just some of the potential highlights

Words: Jamie Dunn

Fire (Claire Denis) French director Claire Denis makes films of three flavours: brutal (High Life, Bastards), swooning (Let the Sunshine In, 35 Shots of Rum) or a bit of both (Beau Travail). Expect the second mode here as she teams up with three of her favourite actors (Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon, Grégoire Colin) for this love triangle about a woman caught between two men.

The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier) Cinema is not short of quirky dramas following beautiful people as they fall in and out of love, but talented Norwegian director Joachim Trier has found some interesting things to say about the genre with this sharp, sweet and inventively-told tale of young romance, which centres on a star-making turn by Renate Reinsve as the eponymous rotter.

Skint! (Peter Mullan, Lisa McGee) We’re drawn to this BBC Four production sight unseen thanks to the talent involved. Peter Mullan and Derry Girls writer Lisa McGee are the creative directors behind this portmanteau film shot in Glasgow and concerned with people living on the breadline. Playwright and actor Cora Bisset, author Jenni Fagan and on-the-rise Glasgow filmmaker James Price are also involved.

Benediction (Terence Davies) British cinema’s patron saint of tortured souls, Terence Davies, is back with this rhapsodic, heartbreaking portrayal of Siegfried Sassoon. The film skips back and forth between the poet’s youth and his old age, with Scottish actors in both roles: Jack Lowden is the tender, fresh-faced Sassoon while Peter Capaldi plays him in his embittered dotage.

Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve) Mia Hansen-Løve pays a loving tribute to Ingmar Bergman while also riffing on her relationship with fellow French director Olivier Assayas in this lyrical and slyly-meta drama. Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth play a vague version of the filmmaking couple while on a tempestuous working holiday on Bergman’s beloved Fårö island.

The Girl and the Spider (Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher) This beautifully controlled drama is centred around a flat moving day and plays out as a deadpan farce, with people stepping in and out of rooms like ball bearings in a pinball machine. Fond farewells commingle with bitter reproaches and sexual tension in this strange, deeply compelling and formally dazzling film from Swiss brothers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher.

The Hermit of Treig (Lizzie MacKenzie) One of the must-see world premieres at the festival will be Lizzie MacKenzie’s long-in-the-making portrait of an elderly hermit called Ken who has been living in self-imposed isolation in the Highlands of Scotland for over 40 years. It certainly puts your lockdown in a fresh perspective.

My Old School (Jono McLeod) You’re always guaranteed a stranger-than-fiction documentary in the GFF line-up, but here’s one that happened on the festival’s doorstep. My Old School tells how ‘Brandon Lee’, a man in his 30s, convinced the staff and pupils of Bearsden Academy he was a teenager who’d recently moved to the posh suburb from Canada. Alan Cumming, who was set to play Brandon in a once-mooted feature film of the story, stands in for him here in this fascinating doc fresh from Sundance.

Nobody Has to Know (Bouli Lanners) Belgian actor-turned-director Bouli Lanners comes to Scotland for his first English-language feature. The islands of Harris and Lewis are the backdrop to a tender romance centred on a farmer (played by Lanners), who’s lost his memory following a stroke, and his carer, who fills in his backstory with one massive porky: she claims they were a couple. The filmmaking is reportedly as lush and unpredictable as the wild, beautiful setting.

Murina (Atoneta Alamat Kusijanovic) We’ve heard nothing but good things about this brooding coming-of-age drama from Croatia, which follows a teen girl whose remote life with her mother and domineering father is interrupted when her mother’s former lover and father’s business partner (played by Kiwi actor Cliff Curtis) comes to visit. GFF clearly love it too: it’s bringing the curtain down on the festival as the closing film.

Glasgow Film Festival, 2-13 Mar; screenings at GFT and Cineworld Renfrew Street, as well as at other partnered cinemas across the UK and online