Full programme announced for Glasgow Film Festival 2026 with movies featuring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie

Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) has announced the full programme for its 22nd edition, with GFF26 running from 25 February until 8 March. The festival will host 126 films across 12 days, including 16 World, European and International premieres, 68 UK premieres, and 18 Scottish premieres, with titles from 44 countries and six continents.

GFF is Scotland’s flagship film festival and is run by Glasgow Film, a charity which also runs Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT). The festival is made possible by support from Screen Scotland and the BFI Audience Projects Fund, both awarding National Lottery funding, and Glasgow Life, the charity which delivers culture, events and active living in Glasgow.Scottish films will open and close the festival, with the UK premiere of BAFTA-winner Felipe Bustos Sierra’s documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street, executive produced by Emma Thompson, about one of Scotland’s most high-profile acts of civil resistance in recent memory, kicking off GFF26 on 25 February.

Closing the festival on 8 March is the UK premiere of James McAvoy’s directorial debut, California Schemin', based on the improbable true story of Scottish rap duo Silibil N’ Brains, a.k.a. Gavin Bain (Séamus McLean Ross) and Billy Boyd (Samuel Bottomley).

As well as Hollywood blockbusters, the festival highlights early-career filmmakers, with 42 titles on the programme being a director’s first or second feature. Glasgow Film Festival 2026 (GFF26) will also showcase 50 foreign language films, with 44 languages being represented in the lineup.

This year’s festival marks Paul Gallagher’s first edition as Head of Programme, working alongside Programme Manager Chris Kumar and a team of Programme Advisors who bring additional specialist insight across key areas of the programme. The advisors include Sam Fraser, with a focus on World Cinema; Lauren Clarke, contributing expertise in Documentary; Heather Bradshaw, bringing a specialism in Animation; and Neha Apsara, whose focus is South Asian Cinema.

Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) will remain as the venue at the heart of the event, with screenings also taking place at ODEON Luxe Glasgow Quay as well as special events happening across the city at Glasgow University Union, Glasgow Women’s Library, and the Pyramid at Anderston.

Scotland on Screen

The spotlight will be on Scottish cinema this year at the country’s biggest film festival, with 13 Scottish films being showcased. A selection of established and new Scottish talent will feature on the big screen alongside opening and closing films.

Scottish films having their world premiere at GFF26 include Sailm nan Daoine (Psalms of the People), Jack Archer’s documentary about Scotland’s cultural heritage of traditional Gaelic psalm singing. The film follows Rob MacNeacail across Scotland and Ireland as he shares Gaelic language psalms with the community. Additionally, Welcome to G-Town is the debut feature from identical twin brothers Ben McQuaid and Nathan McQuaid, which follows shape-shifting aliens that have landed in Glasgow.

The micro-budget sci-fi is firmly Glaswegian with its sense of humour and cast. Made outside the traditional filmmaking pathways, this is the perfect film to see in a cinema with a local audience. Marc Silver’s documentary, Molly vs THE MACHINES, will also have its world premiere at the festival, with nationwide screenings also happening concurrently. The story of a heartbroken father’s quest to uncover the truth behind his daughter's death and his fightback against how the most powerful corporations of the modern age operate, the film is distributed by Scottish production company Cosmic Cat and received significant funding from Screen Scotland.

FrightFest, GFF’s resident horror festival, will also open with the world premiere of Vasily Chuprina’s relentless, high-stakes action thriller Jailbroken, a claustrophobic pressure-cooker set entirely within a single prison cell. Co-produced by Scottish production company Up Helly Aa, the film features a formidable Scottish cast led by Bryan Larkin, David Hayman, Shauna MacDonald and Armin Karima.

Other Scottish films having their UK premieres include Edinburgh filmmaker Sean Dunn's hotly anticipated debut, The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford. Shot on location in Edinburgh and Balerno, and featuring Gayle Rankin, this black comedy stars Peter Mullan as a local history-fixated tour guide who descends into madness as a big-budget fantasy TV show takes over his small town. Iranian-Scottish co-production, Without Permission, by Aberdeen-based British-Iranian director Hassan Nazer, is an intelligent docufiction hybrid about an exiled filmmaker who returns to Iran to shoot a film.

The feature is anchored in authentic interviews with a group of Iranian children who reveal their sweetly hopeful dreams for the future. Filmed primarily in and around Glasgow, Midwinter Break is a touching drama, based on a novel by the same name by Bernard MacLaverty, about a retired married couple who live in Glasgow (played by Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds), who find themselves reflecting on the past and considering their future while on an Amsterdam getaway. Partially shot in Glasgow and Perthshire, My Father's Island spotlights the relationship between a 13-year-old (Woody Norman) and his father (played by Swann Arlaud), as they spend a year together on a remote Nordic island.

Films with ties to Scotland that will have their Scottish premiere at the festival include several standouts. Documentary Super Nature, shot collaboratively across 25 different countries, offers a fresh way of looking at the environment and creatures great and small around us via the glorious and tactile intimacy of vintage Super 8 cameras. Filmmakers based in Oban, Isle of Lewis and Edinburgh are among those who contributed to the film, which also saw partnership from Screen Scotland, co-production from Scottish studio Forest of Black, and co-executive production from Glasgow-based Nikki Parrott of Tigerlily Two.

Raoul Peck’s documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5, braids together George Orwell’s biography and the writing of his final book, 1984, on Jura, and features an exploration of its ideas, including doublethink, Big Brother and newspeak, which resonate more than ever today. Completing the selection is The Son and the Sea, shot on location primarily in the Scottish village of Pennan, which sees two best mates travel from London to the northern Aberdeenshire coast. A chance encounter with a Deaf young man who is also visiting proves the catalyst for change in Stroma Cairns' sensitively observed drama.

World and International Premieres

Set against the wide open landscapes of North Wales is Effi o Blaenau, a Welsh language film adaptation of Gary Owen’s much lauded and widely performed monodrama, Iphigenia in Splott. Directed by Marc Evans, the film follows Effie, a young woman who learns firsthand the personal costs of our societal shortcomings, with a tour-de-force lead performance by up-and-coming actor Leisa Gwenllian.

The festival will also showcase the world premiere of Sinsin and the Mouse, a sensitive and elegantly shot drama that accompanies a young woman, reeling from the death of her mother, on a trip to Taipei, where an encounter with a young man begins to help her break through her grief; and the international premiere of Steal Away, a psychosexual fairy tale set in an alternate reality, where a Congolese woman’s warm welcome into a grand mansion, owned by the mother of a white woman her own age, slowly reveals a far more unsettling desire beneath its surface.

UK Premieres

With 68 UK premieres at GFF26, there will be a wide array of Hollywood stars gracing Glasgow’s big screens. Angelina Jolie stars in Couture by Alice Winocour, which depicts the world of Parisian high fashion from the perspectives of the working-class women involved.Charli XCX co-screenwrites, co-produces, and stars in Erupcja, directed by Pete Ohs, where two friends with an explosive relationship meet in Warsaw. The Dutchman, adapted from the Amiri Baraka play on identity, assimilation and racial power dynamics in America, focuses on Lula (Kate Mara), a white woman, and Clay (André Holland), a black man, riding the subway in New York City. Danny Dyer gives a stellar performance in One Last Deal, a twisting and engaging chamber piece about a football agent desperate to close a contract.

Willem Dafoe stars in two of the festival’s films, Late Fame, which follows an author of a poetry collection which gains appreciation years later among a group of young artists, and The Birthday Party, where a billionaire hosts a birthday party for his daughter on his private Greek island. Scotland-born Emma Laird stars in Satisfaction, a tense psychological drama unfolding across two time periods that charts how a young British composer’s encounter in Greece with a sympathetic new friend leads her to confront a buried traumatic event from her past.

Eddie Marsan and Éanna Hardwicke star in crime thriller No Ordinary Heist, as two bank employees who are forced to help commit a robbery to protect their families, inspired by the true story of one of the UK’s largest cash thefts. The Last Viking, an absurdist comedy revolving around a released robber’s attempts to recover his loot, will see Mads Mikkelsen star as the thief’s brother.

Foreign language films by female filmmakers take a prominent role in the programme. Franz is Agnieszka Holland’s kaleidoscopic and playful biopic depicting the career and personal trajectory of Franz Kafka. Unidentified is Haifaa Al-Mansour’s thriller about a police clerk and true-crime fan who becomes determined to solve the mystery of a murdered schoolgirl.

Between Dreams and Hope, directed by Farnoosh Samadi, follows a trans man who needs his father’s permission for gender-confirming surgery as he travels with his partner back to his Iranian home village. Sundays is Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s sensitive and balanced drama following the emotionally turbulent journey of a teenager and her family after she announces that she is considering becoming a nun.

GFF’s support for early-career directors sees a selection of filmmakers making their debut in the programme.

Tribeny Rai brings Shape of Momo about a woman returning from Delhi to her family home in the mountains, where she must contend with intergenerational tensions and the cultural pressures from the wider community. Lucía Aleñar Iglesias brings Forastera, where a teenager struggling with grief over her grandmother steps into her grandmother’s clothes and vacant role. And Laurent Slama brings A Second Life, which follows a concierge at breaking point who meets a free-spirited and warm-hearted traveller who might change her life.

Directors showcasing their second features include Richard Hawkins’s Think of England, an intelligent wartime satire about six people sent to a remote location with orders to make pornographic films to raise troop morale, with an ensemble cast that includes Natalie Quarry, John McCrea and Ronni Ancona. Damiano Michieletto’s Primavera is a sumptuous period drama set in 18th-century Venice, where a young virtuoso violinist finds her life changing dramatically after the orphanage where she lives hires Vivaldi as an instructor.

GFF26 will also include four animated features, including Allah is Not Obliged, which follows the turbulent life of a 10-year-old orphan coerced into becoming a child soldier. Death Does Not Exist features Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s distinctive dreamlike hand-drawn animation, depicting a young activist grappling with guilt in the tragic wake of a failed armed attack.This year’s programme features two unrelated films, both by the name of Hen.

The gorgeously shot, black-and-white slow-burn South African thriller Hen, which sees a devout husband and his wife start to lose their grip on reality after they take in a strange young boy, and innovative Greek drama Hen, shot from the perspective of a chicken desperate to raise a family, which sees a human tragedy develop in the background.

Comedy offerings include: The Baltimorons, a warm-hearted comedy about a newly sober improv comedian who embarks on a Christmas Eve odyssey across Baltimore with his older emergency dentist; and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, a spin-off from Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s cult comedy web series and TV show about two hapless bandmates trying to book a gig at the legendary Toronto Rivoli.