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October 2025 Programme at GFT

Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) – the city’s home of cinema for over 85 years – has revealed its October 2025 programme. Highlights include:

Exclusive preview screenings from BFI London Film Festival, in partnership with American Express.
A mammoth season celebrating big screen melodrama.
Special screenings to mark Black History Month, in partnership with the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER).
The return of the ever-popular Scotland Loves Anime weekend.
A season of spooky screenings to celebrate Halloween.
Festival Highlights
BFI London Film Festival

One of the biggest events in the UK cinema calendar, BFI London Film Festival (LFF), in partnership with American Express, brings some of the most exciting new films to GFT from 8-19 October – all being shown in the UK for the first (and sometimes only) time. As Glasgow’s only LFF venue, GFT will give audiences an early chance to see 12 hotly anticipated releases including Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

Scotland Loves Anime

Scotland Loves Anime, the UK’s annual festival for Japanese animated film, returns to GFT from 31 October – 4 November with a packed programme of anime masterpieces on the big screen. This year’s line-up includes the UK premiere of Lupin the IIIrd: The Immortal Bloodline, followed by a Q&A with director Takeshi Koike, who will also be taking part in a Q&A after a special screening of his earlier film Redline (2009). GFT will also host the UK premieres of The Last Blossom, 100 Meters, All You Need is Kill, Labyrinth, and the 4K restoration of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.

Fashion in Film Festival

Dust to Dust

Fashion in Film Festival 2025 presents, GROUNDED: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature – a season exploring the deep intersections between dress, identity, technology and ecology. Across four screenings guided by leading artists, curators and academics, fashion becomes a lens for questioning how we live, create and connect.

Jodie Mack’s The Grand Bizarre transforms 85,000 frames of global textile patterns into a pulsating journey through cultural memory and communication systems. Fashion curator Isabella Coraça introduces Take 2: Nature’s Resources, a free, family-friendly programme of animated shorts celebrating human and non-human creativity. Margarita Louca, Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, presents We Are All Chimeras, a provocative set of digital works that collapse the boundary between the organic and the synthetic. Finally, the UK premiere screening of Dust to Dust follows designer Yuima Nakazato from the world’s largest hub for discarded clothes to the haute couture runway, asking how fashion can respond to the ecological cost of its own industry.

Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival

A Want In Her

The Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF) returns to GFT from 22 October – 5 November, with three special screenings exploring this year’s festival theme of Comfort and Disturb. Screenings will include the evocative documentary A Want in Her, which sees visual artist Myrid Carten explore her relationship with her alcoholic mother; Leila Amini’s spellbinding portrait of sisterhood A Sister’s Tale; and a 35th anniversary screening of Jane Campion’s insightful portrait of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table, on 35mm.

Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival

Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival returns to GFT with another eclectic season of essential cinema from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Highlights of this year’s programme include Cristi Puiu’s Y2K teen road trip gem, Stuff and Dough; Ani-masters: Pioneers in Czech Animation; and Kyrgyz classic quasi-western White Mountains, preceded by Ukrainian short Where Russia Ends.

Special Seasons

Too Much: Melodrama on Film

Throughout October and November, GFT will offer film fans from Glasgow and beyond a chance to be overwhelmed by Melodrama. A central season of headline classics will be complemented by strands focusing on Queer Old Hollywood Melodramas curated by Rosie Beattie, and Mexican Melodramas curated by Invisible Women. Screenings will be complemented by a range of illuminating guest speaker introductions and discussions.

GFT’s popular, long-running CineMasters programme will take on the Melodrama theme with a season devoted to the undisputed godfather of pent-up emotion, Tennessee Williams. One of the most adapted playwrights during Hollywood’s Golden Age, Williams’ plays created some of Hollywood’s darkest and most shocking films for the era. Screenings at GFT will include A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Night of the Iguana.

Too Much has been made possible thanks to the BFI Film Audience Network, through funding from the National Lottery.

Black History Month

Delivered in partnership with the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER), this year’s programme for Black History Month at GFT is a celebration of composers, songwriters, soundtracks, writers and playwrights. Screenings will include 1978 musical The Wiz, which saw legendary music producer Quincy Jones team up with Charlie Smalls to bring the Broadway musical’s songs to the big screen, with the help of a powerhouse cast including Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. GFT will also celebrate the 150th birthday of Black British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor with a short film from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) followed by a special screening of Jordan Peele’s Us, scored by Peele’s longtime collaborator Michael Abels. The screening will include a live performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Impromptu No.2 in B Minor by award-winning pianist Adam Heron.

Halloween

halloween

GFT will invite audiences to celebrate spooky season with a selection of scary screenings for Halloween.

Dundead, Dundee Contemporary Arts’ festival and regular screening strand celebrating horror, cult and weird cinema, will bring a special screening of Rupert Julian’s 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera – one of the greatest horror films of the silent era – with a brand-new score by Scottish musicians Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman.

Edinburgh’s legendary horror event, All Day Horror Madness, will return to Glasgow on Sunday 26 October with five back-to-back horror classics playing at GFT.

Celebrating two decades since its original release, horror thriller The Descent will return to the big screen in a crisp new 4K restoration from Friday 24 October.

Lastly, Guillermo del Toro’s hotly anticipated adaptation of Frankenstein will play from Friday 24 October, following its preview screening during London Film Festival.

Coen Brothers of the Month

The popular, long-running Coen Brothers season will continue in October with a special screening of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Special Screenings and Events

GFT’s regular Sound and Vision programme, showcasing epic musical talent on the big screen, continues in October with two special screenings. Silents Synced – an initiative that pairs classic silent movies with epic rock music to bring audiences a unique big screen experience – will present a reimagining of the iconic Nosferatu (1922) featuring Radiohead’s Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) albums on Thursday 2 October. Playing on Saturday 18 October, Dreaming of You: The Making of The Coral follows the story of six childhood outsiders from Merseyside as they transform into one of the most influential British guitar bands of the new millennium.

Now a firm favourite amongst GFT’s cult cinema audience, Hundreds of Beavers star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews will present a special screening of the slapstick comedy in person on Tuesday 21 October, with a special appearance from the beavers themselves.

National Theatre Live will continue to bring the theatre experience to the big screen with their production of Bernard Shaw’s incendiary moral classic Mrs Warren’s Profession, starring five-time Olivier Award winner Imelda Staunton (The Crown) alongside her real-life daughter Bessie Carter (Bridgerton), which will screen at GFT on Thursday 23 October.

Looking further ahead, GFT’s hugely popular festive programme will return in December 2025, with Christmas-week screenings of the beloved classic It’s A Wonderful Life on sale now.

New Releases and Re-releases

GFT will screen a packed slate of new releases and re-releases in October, including Frankenstein, Bugonia, The Mastermind, Princess Mononoke, Dragonfly, Ballad of a Small Player, A House of Dynamite, Souleymane’s Story, The Smashing Machine, The Perfect Blue, House of Mirth, Omar & Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird, Urchin, Hedda, The Lost Bus and I Swear.

Accessible Screenings

In addition to an extensive programme of captioned and audio described screenings, GFT has announced the October editions of its long-running accessible film events.

Access Film Club, delivered in partnership with the National Autistic Society Scotland, includes a film screening and post-film chat in a friendly and welcoming environment. For the October event, GFT has programmed Edgar Wright’s 2010 action adventure comedy Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Tickets are priced £6.90.

Visible Cinema, GFT’s monthly Deaf-friendly film event, returns in October with a 10th Anniversary screening of Frankenstein director Guillermo del Toro’s earlier gothic horror Crimson Peak. There will be full access for Deaf, deafened and hard of hearing cinema-goers at this screening. The film will have descriptive subtitles, and the introduction and discussion will have Live Captioning and BSL interpretation. Tickets are available for £6.90.

Movie Memories, GFT’s dementia-friendly film event, will screen the Technicolor classic The Wizard of Oz. Designed to enable people living with dementia to socialise in a safe and welcoming environment, tickets for Movie Memories cost £3 and include free refreshments and live music.

Book tickets

Tickets for GFT’s October programme are on sale now from glasgowfilm.org and the GFT Box Office.

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