Monty Python legend helps Glasgow Film Festival end on a high
GLASGOW Film Festival 2019 ended on a high with record admissions and an appearance by Monty Python legend Sir Michael Palin.
Total admissions for the festival hit 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
Sir Michael met up with an old friend, Hamish MacInnes, for the premiere of the documentary Final Ascent, which tells how the legendary mountaineer pieced his life back together from his own books and films after being sectioned in 2014 with delirium related to dementia.
A former mountain rescue head, Mr MacInnes, 88, has scaled peaks worldwide and invented life-saving equipment, including a mountain rescue stretcher used globally.
The Scottish mountaineer helped set up a rope bridge in Glencoe for the Monty Python team, which became the famed Bridge of Death in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Sir Michael said: “I’ve had a good working life with Hamish, he’s inspirational really.
“He’s unlike anyone else I know and he has qualities unlike anybody else I know.
“After his illness a few years back it’s so great to see him not just back on form but better than ever, almost.”
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.
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.