Film festival to pay homage to Casablanca star as well as Australian cinema.

The 11th Glasgow Film Festival (Feb 18 - Mar 1) is to honour the life and career of Swedish actress Ingrid Berman to mark the centenary of her birth.

The homage strand, titled Here’s Looking at You, will pay tribute to late star with films from her early days in Sweden and classics such as Casablanca, Gaslight, Anastasia and Murder on the Orient Express to the last features she made before her death in 1982.

The forthcoming edition of the festival, which will run a day longer than in 2014, will include a number of changes.

The Glasgow Youth Film Festival will be a weekend festival, focussed on teenagers from Feb 6-8, and for the first time the Glasgow Short Film Festival will run on its own, from March 11-15.

There will be fewer films in the programme next year, as the Cineworld in Glasgow’s city centre is currently undergoing a refurbishment. More showings will be staged at the CCA and Grosvenor Cinemas.

GFF 2015 will feature a strand titled Strewth! focussed on new and classic Australian cinema. It follows Glasgow’s passing of the Commonwealth Games baton over to the Gold Coast.

New programme strands at the forthcoming festival include Nerdvana, bringing together the festival’s previous ‘geek-friendly’ events with a focus on cult cinema, gaming and comic book culture; Pioneer, which focusses on “great directors of the future”; and CineMasters, offering a preview at new work from internationally renowned auteurs.

The Modern Families strand will aim at children and their parents as the Glasgow Youth Film Festival focusses on teenagers.

These strands will run alongside and in conjunction with GFF’s pop-up cinema events, using of some of the city’s unique venues. However, the fortchoming edition will take its celebration of the city a step further.

Taking its name from the four-year local history project run by Glasgow Film, the Cinema City strand will feature screenings of classic Glasgow-set films alongside an exhibition showcasing memorabilia and oral histories of cinema-going in the city. 

This year’s festival registered more than 40,000 admissions to its films. Full etails of the 2015 edition will be released on Jan 21.