New strand for Glasgow Film Festival 2012

Crossing the Line - exploring experimental and artists' film

Glasgow Film Festival is excited to announce a brand new strand for the 2012 Festival. Crossing the Line is dedicated to exploring the crossover between visual art and cinema and includes features by the world's leading visual artists as well as the best in contemporary experimental and avant-garde film. GFF 2012 warmly thanks sponsor and programmer Hugo Brown (Crossing the Line at GoMA).

Gail Tolley, who initiated and co-programmed the new strand says: "Crossing the Line is a particularly exciting addition to this year's Festival given Glasgow's history as a place where some of the world's most respected moving image artists have lived, worked and studied, from animator Norman McLaren to Turner Prize-winner Douglas Gordon. The strand will explore and champion the most exciting experimental and avant-garde films of the last year whilst also reflecting the growing trend of artists working in film."

The inaugural year's programme includes the Scottish premiere of Two Years at Sea, acclaimed artist Ben Rivers' award-winning portrait of a man living a remote life in rural Scotland, which won the FIPRESCI prize at Venice Film Festival last year, plus a programme of Ben Rivers' short films, The Scope Trilogy.

Also screening is Glaswegian artist Luke Fowler's latest film All Divided Selves, an unconventional portrait of counterculture figure R D Laing, and the weird and wonderful Finisterrae, the brainchild of Sonar Festival's Sergio Caballero and winner of Rotterdam Film Festival's Tiger Award. The Forgotten Space is a thought-provoking film essay about sea cargo and the global economy from Allan Sekula and Noel Burch (in partnership with Stills Gallery, Edinburgh) and in The Dilapidated Dwelling British experimental filmmaker Patrick Keiller explores Britain's love affair with old buildings (in partnership with Tramway), while documentarian Grant Gee retraces the footsteps of German author W G Sebald's influential novel The Rings of Saturn in Patience (After Sebald).

The Glue Factory is the venue for an immersive cinematic event from maverick art collective 85A featuring the work of Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer. And for the first time GFF sets up camp at GoMA with an installation of three award-winning contemporary short films from Glasgow-born art collector Hugo Brown's Cobra to Contemporary collection: Nicolas Provost's Plot Point (2007) was awarded an Honourable Mention at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and uses hidden-camera footage of everyday life around Times Square in New York, edited and scored to lead the viewer into a subconscious process of discovering a story. Pruitt-Igoe Falls (2009) by Cyprien Gaillard, recent winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize at the Centre Pompidou, rhymes the 2008 demolition of the Sighthill tower block in Glasgow with the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St Louis, Missouri, in 1972. Lucia, Luis and the Wolf (Joaquin Cocina, Cristobal Leon, Niles Atallah, 2007/8) is a two-part stop-motion animation from Chile which has won awards at both VIS Vienna Independent Shorts and the YouTube Play Biennale at The Guggenheim in New York.

Margaret Tait Award - world premiere of 2011 winner

Glasgow-based artist Anne-Marie Copestake was winner of Glasgow Film Festival's 2011 Margaret Tait Award which is supported by Creative Scotland and in partnership with LUX. Anne-Marie was awarded the £10,000 prize to create a new piece of work for the 2012 Festival.

GFF presents the world premiere and only screening of her unique film commission And Under That. Combining the footage and sounds surrounding two women, she creates a portrait through the acts of looking and listening. Themes that emerge from the work are legacies and patterns of so-called emancipation. The women vocalise fragmented language built from ideas, questions, observations, histories uncovered, history's subjective nature, moments of alienation and resisting completion.

Immediately following the screening will be a live soundtrack performance by Glasgow-based musician/composer/producer Stevie Jones and band Muscles of Joy, of which filmmaker Anne-Marie Copestake is a member. (Wednesday 22 February, 21.00, free but ticketed, tickets available on the day from GFT)

Glasgow Film Festival is committed to supporting emerging talent and works collaboratively across the country to present a varied programme that represents the diversity of voices in film and moving image within Scotland. The 2012 Margaret Tait Award competition will be announced in the spring.

www.glasgowfilm.org/festival