This year Glasgow Film Festival was ten years old. We asked five writers to tell you about a film they saw during the Festival that matters.

These Birds Walk – Blake Backlash

Glasgow Film Festival keeps moving. It opened this year with The Grand Budapest Hotel, which comes at you like a champagne cork and features Wes Anderson’s first chase sequence. Sauchiehall Street unspools past you as you run between cinemas, from one film to the next. Sometimes there’s free booze, it feels sophisticated, grown-up and happening.

Then you see something that makes everything stop. These Birds Walk is about children who have run-away from home in Karachi and the work of the Edhi Foundation that tries to house them. Many of the reviews have focussed on how the film looks, and it does seem to capture the way light moves over buildings in Karachi, so that you can almost feel it on your skin. But for the most part the directors, Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq, just observe interactions between the boys (they are all boys) and the work of Assad, who volunteers for the project, driving an ambulance, picking up boys from the police and sometimes returning them to their parents.

It doesn’t take long before you are reminded of what deep sadness does to the faces and voices of children. The way it makes them seem older and more knowing but no less vulnerable. If that sounds sentimental, then blame me, not the film-makers. They show us real people, who have been hurt and damaged. There’s a scene when Omar, the nine-year-old boy we spend most time with, is playfighting with other boys. It turns to real fighting and Omar can neither win nor give-up. As he is being punched by a bigger kid, Omar defiantly informs him that he is going to fuck the big kid’s mother and his sister. But eventually he has to hold back the tears that spring up when you are nine and lose a fight. So, noticing that one of his sandals is missing, he slaps a younger, smaller boy, threatening him and asking him where the sandal is. This prompts other boys to defend the weaker kid and Omar gets humiliated again. The scene ends with him using the string and handle from his kite to fish for his sandal, which has been thrown to the other side of a locked gate.

The way pain flows from one boy to another, the way Omar feels he needs to show he can hurt someone after he’s been hurt, feels horribly familiar. But the film also makes clear that the work of the Edhi Foundation takes place in particular place, with particular cultural, political and economic contexts. At one point Assad asks the man who founded the project what he should do when he has to use his ambulance to transport a dead-body to the mortuary at the same time he has to pick up a runaway boy. He’s told he has to do both.

Some things seem universal, some seem particular. Sometimes the universal is the particular. For a couple of weeks in February, the Film Festival takes over the top floor of the Cineworld in the middle of Glasgow. It’s supposed to be the world’s tallest cinema and when you come out of a film, you’re about 200 feet up. I came out of These Birds Walk and looked at the city – you can see all the way to the hills at the edge of it – and thought about Glasgow, the life it has to it and the problems it faces, and about how films can make a foreign city seem knowable, or the place you live in seem strange.

The House of Him – Caitlin Watson

Despite abandoning our own house for the best part of a week and living on sandwiches to get to events straight after work, I still only managed to see a woefully small proportion of what was on. An improvement from last year; but then that’s what I love about GFF – the ability to dip in and out of what’s out there. With so many different strands, you can easily broaden your horizons…or stick to what you love best.

Complementary seminars and quizzes help the whole thing to feel like an unpretentious, enthusiastic celebration of all genres of film. As such, the choice is HUGE, so deciding what to go and see can be somewhat overwhelming… we used the effective technique: what are our pals going to/putting on?

And so to Him. I must confess that knowing the people involved, we contributed a tiny element to this film; we made a prop for it. But this is very much in the spirit of the film, shot over Christmas for £900 – a collaborative piece pulled together by mates who were keen to make a Good Thing.

Going to see a friend’s film is a strange experience – I had full faith that it was going to be good (confirmed by the trailer), though at the same time no idea what to expect  – except, perhaps, to be slightly distracted whilst trying to catch a glimpse of the hammer we made.

I was not disappointed; the hammer looks amazing.

In all seriousness, I really enjoyed the film. Set in a serial killer’s home, we share the night with his latest intended victims. The horror stems from just how bad people can be, but is also infused with the supernatural. With effective jolts along the way, a few judicial changes of pace leave you wondering where it’s going next, mimicking the heroine’s experience. Dark, claustrophobic, intense; but also shot through with elements of the bizarre which, while juxtaposed with the situation, still sat well with the unsettling environment of His Home.

None of this would have worked as well if not for the cast, who were just great: genuine menace from the baddie, with believable terror, bravery, resignation and helplessness from the heroine. Excellent turns from the supporting cast rounded the whole thing out, helped by imaginative visuals and a cracking score.

The soundtrack is incredible – I’ve heard it described as Carpenter-esque, but I can’t lay claim to having picked up on that – the quieter bits struck me as having a muted Exorcist-type vibe, complementing the stuck-in-a-bad-dream atmosphere well.

I do hope this film manages to get another showing/fuller release so more people can get to see it – it feels truly born of Glasgow, and features a satisfyingly convincing prosthetic tool.

Visitors – Danni Glover

What is a visitor? Godfrey Reggio’s first film since the Qatsi trilogy, Visitors, presented as part of the Festival’s Stranger than Fiction strand, has some confrontational ideas. Quite who the film is confronting is unclear. It opens with an unidentified planetscape and a prolonged shot of the face of a gorilla – we learn from the credits, named Triska – and it’s easy to see this as an atheistic challenge to Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. A sequence which features disembodied hands miming the routine and ritual of technological engagement confronts both the tendency of our once craft-oriented species to become immersed in our technological distractions, and the limitations of the opinion that we are better off without it. Indeed, the evocation of Triska would suggest a preoccupation with the primate’s mix of aggression and raw curiosity towards the unknown.

Philip Glass’ score – he has worked with Reggio in the past – at turns recalls a comforting sense of a familiar past, assaults the listener in angry bursts, or falls silent, leaving her to confront her own thoughts. Then there are the long, wordless shots which pan across the faces of a string of actors, locked in an unflinching eye contact with the camera, with each other, with the viewer, in a way which is reminiscent of (especially the short films of) Steve McQueen.

This is a film which engages in artistic and social dialogue while also challenging the personal. We are all the visitors. As a species we are merely dropping by on a planet which will turn without us. As an audience we are invited to visit Reggio’s visionary commentary, but we’re not sure how comfortable we are in the venue. The actors invite themselves to gawp at our observational visitation (a scene in which the actors are arranged as in a cinema, sharing snacks, whispers, and the half-embrace of an early date, I realised that we were through the screen and being started at ourselves; just then they burst into rapturous laughter at my expression of astonishment.) With a filming style which is conscious of the uses and limitations of realism, Reggio is aware that he himself is a visitor – the kind who expects to be thanked for coming.