Glasgow Film Festival features Welsh and Bremner’s biopic of music mogul Mcgee
An eagerly-awaited bi opic of Scottish music mogul Alan McGee-written by Irvine Welsh and starring Ewen Bremner as the Creation Records founder - will be revealed when the city's film festival returns in virtual form next month.
The event, which has been forced to shelve plans to stage in- cinema screenings, has unveiled a programme of more than 60 premieres, all of which will be staged online between 24 February and 7 March.
Audience numbers will be strictly limited for each pre - miere and restricted to film fans in the UK, who will have a 72-hour window to watch them via the festival' s own streaming platform.
Organisers admitted they were left in tears after a bid to join forces with more than 20 venues across the UK to reveal new films to cinemagoers were left in tatters by the tightened restrictions imposed over the winter.
However they insisted they had missed out on only a handful of films after being forced to stage the event in an online format and that there was never any question of cancellation.
The GFF has secured a clutch of new movies featuring Scottish actors, writers and directors for its 17th edition, which will be around a third of its usual size.
Creation Stories, which will get its UK premiere, charts the life story of Mcgee, whole ft school in Glasgow at the age of 16 and shaped the careers of bands such as The Jesus and Mar y Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream before discovering Oasis in his native Glasgow.
Trainspotting star Bremner appears a long side Suki Waterhouse, Jason Is a a cs, Jason Flemyng, Paul Kaye, Steven Berkoff, Thomas Turgo ose, Rufus Jones and Ed Byrne.
The film is directed by Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Harry Potter star Nick Moran, who has described it as “a modern day fable,” and executive produced by Trainspotting director Danny Boyle.
Speaking about Mcgee during filming, Bremner said: “A lot of legends have built up about him over the years, he's fascinating.
"There are books and documentaries about him, and he released so much eclectic music. "He was someone who could see what other people couldn't. Oasis had been rejected by all the major labels before he stumbled across them and decided they were going to be bigger than U2.
“A lot of what he was doing, he was the guy who did eve - r ything wrong but it all went right, you know?' He signed the bands that everyone else saw a hundred red flags around, and created these culturally important milestones in popular music."
Other highlights of the GFF programme include Limbo, Edinburgh-based director Ben Sharrock’ s criticallyacclaimed story which exploring the live sofa group asylum seekers sent to a remote Scottish island. Oscar-winning Scottish director Kevin Macdonald will unveil The Mauritian, a legal thriller based on the real-life diaries of a man held in the Gauntanamo Bay detention camp for years without charge or a trial, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Jodie Foster.
Scotland is to get a new film and TV studio in Glasgow' s west end under an £11.9 million plan to transform part of the historic Kelvin Hall.
It is hoped the new facility will be up and running within months to capitalise on record demand to use Scotland for as a base for major productions.
A funding package has been agreed in principle between the Scottish Government and the city council to create a “box” studio for filming and new production facilities at the 94-year-old venue.
The Kelvin Hall is already home to Scotland’ s of fici al screen archive after a new home was created for the collection, cared for by the National Library of Scotland, as part of a £40 million redevelopment completed in 2016.
The new studio and production facilities will be created to the east of the new facilities created in the previous revamp.
The government has agreed to provide up to £7.9 min funding, with the council planning to b or row £4m, to get the 10,000 sq ft studio up and running.
The deal, expected to be rubber-stamped by councillors on Thursday, has emerged days after the government’s screen agency revealed it was seeing “more productions than ever looking to shoot in studios and build space across Scotland.”
The council said the new studio would help overcome a “significant barrier” to the city’ s efforts to attract major film and TV productions. Talks with potential users are already said to be “well advanced.”
The Kelvin Hall venture has been announced 10 months after an operator for a proposed studio on Edinburgh’s waterfront was announced. It has already attracted an Amazon Prime thriller set on a North Sea oil rig.
Council leader Susan A itken said :“Glasgow’ s creative industries are hugely important not only to the city’s economy, but also its culture and its national and international profile. The city is home to an incredible community of independent producers, with access to an en viable pipeline of young talent. We know they’re in demand all over the country and, often, the world – but we also know that, here at home, there is a relative lack of the kind of studio space they need.”