Blake Backlash on what this year’s Glasgow Film Festival has taught him.

1. Glasgow’ film fans are committed

Cinema seems to be the number one priority of some of the folk I met at the Festival. They don’t fool around. Literally in some cases. As I sat down to watch Fatih Akın’s The Cut, the person next to me was telling their friend about how they had been spending some quality time with their partner just before heading out to the pictures and ‘things started to get a little… fruity, actually. But I had to put a stop to it. I said I’ve got to go and watch a two-and-a-half hour film about the Armenian genocide’.

They also love their Q and A’s. Their questions are insightful and having the chance to talk to filmmakers gets them passionate and enthusiastic. So much so that the audience are quite happy to make their own Q and As if none are laid on for them. There wasn’t one scheduled after the showing of Catch Me Daddy that I was at. But since Gary Lewis was in the audience, the audience asked him questions anyway. And Lewis was totally up for it.

2. No good deed goes unpunished (especially if you are a small town cop).

I saw two great films about police officers in rural areas.  A Girl At My Door directed by July Jung, begins with Lee Young-nam’s arrival in a small seaside town, to take up her post as police-chief. Soon she find herself looking after Seon Do-hee, a 12 year-old-girl who is bullied by her classmates and abused by her step-father. Doo-hee ends up living with Young-nam. In another kind of cop-movie this plot development might just be a way to clue the audience in on the protagonist’s fundamental decency. But this film uses it to start a painful exploration of Young-nam’s own flaws and the corrosive psychological damage child-abuse has inflicted on Do-hee. For me, the film’s insistence that we should not expect people to be righteous or pure made these characters more admirable.

Man From Reno also begins with a cop in car. Sheriff Paul Del Moral is driving through fog. He finds an abandoned car then accidentally hits a Japanese man, who he takes to hospital. Meanwhile, Aki Akahori arrives in San Francisco from Japan, playing truant from her latest book-tour. She has a romantic encounter with Akira, who then takes a shower and vanishes. One of the many delicious things about Man From Reno is watching these two plot strands unfold – it’s like you get two different flavours of mystery movie in one: rural-noir blended with a misty and glamorous San Francisco caper flick. Then, towards the end we find the film is also a kind of riff on… well, that would be saying too much. But there is darkness here. Sheriff Del Moral tries to do the right thing by the man he hit with his car and by Aki. At some cost to himself.

3. Mistakes Can Be Beautiful

One of the films in the Festival’s Ingrid Bergman stand was the 1944 version of Gaslight. The version that actually arrived in Glasgow, initially, was  Thorold Dickinson’s 1940 version which starts Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard (who is saved by a wily Northern policeman, instead of Joseph Cotten). Eventually, the right version did arrive, so Glaswegian Gaslight fans had the pleasure of seeing both the older film and the one with Ingrid Bergman in it. We are lucky people are still able to see the Dickinson version. In 1944 when MGM bought the rights to the film, David O Selznick asked that there be a clause in the contract that all of the prints of the British film should be destroyed. Dickinson himself is supposed to have sneakily made one print for himself before the negative was destroyed. Presumably all versions of his film that we see today, including the one that came to Glasgow by fortuitous error, are descendants of this surreptitiously made print.

4. If you build it,they will come

This lesson is brought to you by special-guest contributor, Matthew Turner, who writes: