Thank you so much for your warm support for our 2025 festivals so far! We’re beyond excited to be bringing Real Utopias to you from September to November, and after a beautiful, galvanising festival in Edinburgh we can’t wait to welcome you for three more weekends of screenings, discussions, and workshops rooted in connection and building collective power to transform our world.

As you may have noticed, we are not hosting our Glasgow festival in our customary venues of the Glasgow Film Theatre and Centre for Contemporary Arts this year. Many of you may have been keeping up with the ongoing public campaigns asking both venues to endorse the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), of which Take One Action is a proud signatory. 

Indeed, we are proud to be part of a globally significant movement through our endorsement of PACBI. Scotland is also leading the way internationally with the cultural boycott, with the most endorsements for PACBI per capita in the world. However, we and many of our peers in the Scottish film and arts sector have been disappointed by both the GFT and CCA’s refusal to take a stance of solidarity with Palestine almost two years into a genocide waged by Israel, and with which our governments and institutions remain complicit here in the UK.

There has been some local progress recently – the Scottish Government announced that it will stop the financing of new contracts with arms companies linked to Israel, and First Minister John Swinney issued a statement that any recognition of the Palestinian state “must be accompanied by sanctions on Israeli security cabinet members, a ban on the trade in goods from illegal settlements, and the suspension of the UK–Israel trade deal”. We hope that arts institutions will recognise the direction of travel and finally join the push for an end to genocide. 

Our festival this year is themed around Real Utopias. We do not feel able to hold our events in the GFT or CCA  until meaningful reparation and change has been made. We also do not feel able to speak of hope, transformation, community, justice, solidarity, and liberation without acknowledging the profound rift that has been exposed in Scotland’s arts spaces over Palestine. Take One Action is one of many partners and festivals these venues rely on to bring a radical, grassroots spirit and audiences through their doors – but they have exhibited concerning behaviour in response to their communities’ calls to endorse PACBI – and opening their doors to us in the aftermath is not enough.

At GFT, we were disturbed by the board’s statement on rejecting PACBI, which failed to name the genocide and its perpetrator, and which led to the resignation of three of its trustees – all of whom are women, and two of whom are women of colour. We strongly reiterate our call for GFT to revisit its decision on PACBI, and as a matter of urgency to stop airing Barclays advertisements on its screens – a bank which is financing the genocide in Palestine, and also the first bank in the UK to ban trans women from using female toilets in its buildings.

At CCA, Take One Action co-signed a letter with many fellow film festivals in response to its shocking deployment of police and police violence on 24th June against members of the public joining a teach-in centred on Palestine, which you can read here. The CCA has recently released an encouraging statement opening the door to much-needed reparation, institutional transformation, and accountability to its community – a community we are part of, and whose calls for our art spaces to align themselves with justice and liberation are indivisible from Take One Action’s mission. We join the call from Art Workers for Palestine Scotland, CCA’s own workers, and our community and audiences to hold CCA accountable in this period of transformation.

Ultimately our mission is to connect, inspire and galvanise people through storytelling on screen. One of the tactics adopted against Palestine has been to wipe out its own narratives and stories, dehumanising and erasing a people through distorted Western news reporting, and through a systematic wiping out of Palestinian storytellers and journalists. Part of our responsibility is to critique the giant narratives that colonialism and capitalism sell us, and create and tell our own grassroots stories as communities in solidarity with one another, locally and globally.

And with that, we extend the warmest welcome for you to join us for our Glasgow festival from 25th-28th September – with a condensed version of our film programme taking place on Saturday 27th, as well as Beans on Screen, a beautiful event themed around food justice, climate and community at Platform on Thursday 25th, and a grassroots co-programmed double screening with Exhale Arts on Sunday 28th. 

Due to the immediacy of our festival dates in Glasgow, Take One Action had to make the swift decision to relocate our main feature screenings to GMAC as developments unfolded at GFT and CCA. Wanting to keep the reason for our decision front and centre, we are hosting an assembly event called Building Arts Spaces for Palestinian Liberation at 11am on Saturday 27th September, where we will centre the call for the cultural boycott from Palestine, and imagine, strategise, and tangibly act to build the arts spaces we deserve. We encourage CCA and indeed GFT staff to join us for these conversations. We will also be serving breakfast!

We also acknowledge that none of the venues across the four cities we will be touring have endorsed PACBI: Filmhouse, GMAC, Eden Court, and Dundee Contemporary Arts. This is consistent with the pattern of PACBI endorsement across our sector; smaller, grassroots, artist-led and often precarious organisations have demonstrated strength in solidarity through joining the cultural boycott, whereas better-funded, well-established institutions remain noticeably absent. Unfortunately, cinematic and theatrical venue options in our festival cities that are able to fulfill our capacity and accessibility needs are few and far between – and none of them have currently endorsed PACBI. 

This gap has been acutely felt by us and fellow PACBI-endorsed film festivals; hence, we hope our event in Glasgow will not only strengthen the call for our existing arts spaces to truly represent us, but also engage seriously with the need for building alternative spaces to serve our communities. We will be continuing to use our relationships with the above institutions to encourage them to endorse the cultural boycott.

Thank you so much for your support, and for reading this far. We are so excited to welcome you to the 17th edition of Take One Action Film Festivals, wherever we might meet you.