What to see at Glasgow Film Festival 2026 (SNACK Picks)

Glasgow Film Festival is back in all its glory, kicking off on Wednesday 25th February with the hotly-anticipated European premiere of Everybody to Kenmure Street. It’s the first edition of the festival with the GFT’s Paul Gallagher at the helm, and from the stacked programme that he and his team have curated, we’re particularly taken with the documentaries, world cinema, and retrospective films. Tickets for Everybody to Kenmure Street and many other events in the programme have already sold out, but we’re here to guide you through the best of the rest. At time of writing, all films mentioned have tickets left for purchase.

Mark Jenkin has spent his career making hauntological 16mm films exploring Cornish lore, landscapes, and legacies of industry. His experiments with technique (such as creating all sound in post-production) and temporality have positioned him as a singular voice in contemporary British cinema. In his latest, the ship Rose of Nevada returns to shore after a long absence; fishermen Nick (GFF mainstay George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner) accept jobs on it only to find the ship has transported them back to the town’s 1990s heyday. With two major British actors in the leading roles, a bigger budget, and backing from the BFI, Rose of Nevada is a significant step up for Jenkin in terms of scale while preserving all his instincts for the uncanny.

A Fox Under a Pink Moon spends five years with Afghan teenager Soraya as she sets out from Iran to reunite with her mother in Austria. The documentary is billed as a collaboration between Soraya and the Iranian director Mehrdad Oskouei, Soraya’s journey is depicted via self-shot phone clips: the domestic work she undertakes in Tehra; the Istanbul dormitory where she waits to make the crossing to Greece; furtive footage from the inside of a shipping container.

There are also animated sequences based on Soraya’s artwork. Soraya’s level of input and authorship shouldn’t feel unprecedented, but portrayals of migration rarely afford those with the lived experience such agency. A Fox Under a Pink Moon looks like a vital corrective to shallow media representations of people on the move as well as an unconventional travelogue along the routes taken by those making irregular border crossings.

It’s been a record-breaking year for Basque cinema, with films from the region scooping 45 nominations at Spain’s Goya Awards. 13 of those nominations are for Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s Sundays, in which 17-year-old Ainara (newcomer Blanca Soroa) returns from a trip to a convent with the conviction of becoming a cloistered nun. Ruiz de Azúa’s film keeps the audience guessing as to whether Ainara’s conviction is borne out of a genuine religious calling or a reaction to a death in the family. Impressive performances from Soroa and Patricia López Arnaiz (20,000 Species of Bees) bring this conflict of family and faith to celestial heights.

From the lucha libre scene to Frida Kahlo’s paintings to Chavela Vargas’ rancheras, many of Mexico’s biggest cultural exports have a heightened queer sensibility and following. A new documentary from Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig adds Jaripeo to this conversation, speaking to the LGBT+ people whose identities go hand-in-hand with the Mexican rodeo sport. Although the sport of jaripeo appears on the surface to be a hypermasculine environment, Mojica (whose familiarity with the community brings a welcome level of access) and Zweig’s film teases out the flamboyance and gender performance inherent to the sport, making it clear why queer Mexicans flock to and find community within it. We’re expecting to see some killer stunts and costumes.

We’re pleased to see work from Palestine in the programme in the form of Kamal Aljafari’s experimental documentary With Hasan in Gaza. Aljafari’s film revisits footage he shot during a 2001 trip to Gaza, the purpose of which was to locate a man he’d been imprisoned with in 1989, and acts as a temporal bridge between the First and Second Intifadas as well as between Gaza’s past and present. With Hazan in Gaza preserves a Gaza that the world has failed to: scenes of playful children and bustling streets read as elegiac in the context of the last two and a half years of destruction and decimation.

Francesco Sossai’s The Last One for the Road sees fiftysomethings Doriano and Carlobianchi embark on a grappa-fuelled road trip through the Veneto countryside. Never knowing when to call it a night and stumbling from one watering hole to another, they end up picking up a stray in the form of tightly-wound young architecture student Guilio, inducting him into their pleasure-seeking way of life. Sossai’s film has something of GFF hit La Chimera in its DNA with its use of mixed Kodak film stocks, its clash of old and new sensibilities, and its time spent by gravesides.

This year the theme of GFF’s free morning retrospective films is Truth to Power, a selection of political thrillers, dramas, and satires. It’s packed with classics like the paranoia-drenched All the President’s Men, the Marx Brothers farce Duck Soup, and Stanley Kubrick’s jet-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove. The two that we’re most excited about are Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, and Pablo Larraín’s No.

Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, depicts a key moment in Algeria’s struggle against French colonial rule, featuring former FLN fighters amongst its cast. Its combination of more-established neorealist and then-emerging third cinema form, its breathless setpieces filmed in the Casbah, and its Ennio Morricone score create a heady depiction of guerilla warfare and the increasingly dirty tactics used to quell such resistance.

Given its obvious parallels with the ongoing Arab liberation struggle taking place in Palestine, we once again call on the GFT board members to endorse the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Before Pablo Larraín crossed over into Hollywood with Jackie, Spencer, and Maria, a triptych of moment-in-time biopics about totemic twentieth-century women, he made a slate of films in his native Chile grappling with the country’s political history. 2012’s No portrays Chile’s 1988 plebiscite, when citizens were asked to vote on whether Pinochet’s brutal (but by-that-point flagging) regime should continue. Gael García Bernal plays the advertising executive tasked with transforming a dreary ‘No’ campaign into a winning one.

Although criticised by Chilean activists for focusing on the marketing campaign rather than those who tried to defeat Pinochet’s US-backed regime from the grassroots, No raises some worthwhile questions about the uneasy relationship between advertising and activism, a tension which has only grown more prominent. With another right-wing ghoul about to assume the presidency in Chile and recent escalation in US campaigns of interference and immiseration throughout Latin America, No feels as instructive as ever on the need to reject tyranny and to foreground joy and optimism in our fight for a better world.

Glasgow Film Festival 2026 takes place from 25th February till 8th March