Borrowed voices, open doors: Manchester Film Festival 2026
Manchester Film Festival closes with exactly the right kind of film. Not something inflated for the sake of a finale, but a work that catches hold of one of the festival’s deeper currents.
California Schemin’ arrives at the end of 11 days of screenings, conversations, applause and immersion. In its story of borrowed voices and improvised entry points, it reflects something larger about the festival itself. This year’s edition has been the biggest yet. More than 10,000 tickets were sold, with screenings spread across HOME, Odeon Great Northern, Northern Light Cinema, Flix at the Treehouse Hotel, and Aviva Studios. The numbers tell one story. The better story is what it felt like to be there.
From the opening night, there was a shift. At Aviva Studios, hosting the opening pairing of films, the foyer was loud, open, and unselfconscious. People, talking, queueing, finding their way in. Film does that. It can take a guarded space and make it public in the best sense. Here, the tone for the festival was set. Kit Harington’s Psychopompoffered a darkly comic passage into the underworld, myth pulled into the present through crime and ritual. Jan Komasa’s The Good Boy followed with something colder, a film about punishment, family and control that was unsettling and sharply funny at once. They were different in approach, but linked by the way they landed in the room.