Glasgow Film Festival 2019 celebrates record audience numbers and closes with the UK premiere of Brian Welsh’s Beats

Audience Award goes to Matt Pinder’s captivating documentary Harry Birrell: Films of Love and War, narrated by Bodyguard star Richard Madden, following its world premiere at GFF19

Glasgow Film Festival 2019 ended on a high tonight as it celebrated record admissions and announced the winner of its prestigious Audience Award.

Total admissions for the festival are 42,224 – a new record. There were also record admission numbers at the festival’s partner venues Cineworld Renfrew Street and CCA and the brand new Everyman cinema was welcomed to the festival family, plus the free morning retrospective strand of classic cinema celebrated its fourth year by recording its biggest ever audience, as over 300 people packed into a free screening of Midnight Cowboy.

Actor Laura Fraser announced the winner of the Audience Award at the UK premiere of Beats, the major new feature about rave culture in 90s Scotland. The only trophy handed out at the Festival, the Audience Award is given to the most popular film out of a specially selected shortlist of 10 by first or second-time directors.

Produced by Harry’s granddaughter Carina Birrell, directed by Glasgow-based Matt Pinder and narrated by Bodyguard and Game of Thrones star Richard Madden, Harry Birrell: Films of Love and War uses hundreds of hours of archive footage to weave the story of one man’s cinematic vision of the 20th century. Paisley-born Harry Birrell was given his first cine-camera as a boy in 1928 and spent his life recording incidents great and small. His home movies of family events and fine romances now ache with fond nostalgia but Harry’s life was also filled with far away adventures. Matt Pinder’s beautifully composed, captivating documentary, which had its World Premiere at Glasgow Film Festival on 24 February, plunders the treasure trove of Harry’s 400 films and personal diaries to capture a vivid sense of wartime years spent in Bombay, the jungles of Burma and the mountains of Nepal. The film will visit cinemas around Scotland later this year as part of GFF On Tour.

Previous winners of the Audience Award, sponsored by Benihana, include Xavier Legrand’s Custody and Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha. This year, six out of the 10 shortlisted films were directed by women.

Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) is one of the leading film festivals in the UK and run by Glasgow Film, a charity which also runs Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT). GFF is made possible by support from Glasgow Life, Screen Scotland, the British Film Institute (using funds from The National Lottery) and EventScotland. Glasgow Film Festival will return for its 16th edition from 26 February to 8 March 2020.

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