Manchester Film Festival returning for its 10th year – which films are showing and how to get tickets

Manchester Film Festival is returning in March for its milestone 10th year, with an official selection of 45 films from around the world, plus more than 100 short films, as well as workshops, Q&As with cast and crew, and a celebrity guest.

As in previous years, the festival will take place at the Great Northern Odeon in Manchester city centre from Friday 15 to Sunday, March 24. The program includes Manchester, UK and world premieres, with some films having already had success on the global film festival circuit last year.

Kicking things off this year will be the UK premiere of The Covert by New Zealand director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, Along Came a Spider). It stars Guy Pearce (Memento, L.A. Confidential) as a preacher who arrives in New Zealand in 1830 and gets caught up in a war between Maori tribes. 

Actor Richard Armitage, known for playing Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, will be making an appearance, promoting his film The Boy in the Woods, a moving survival story based on the memoir of Canadian Holocaust survivor Maxwell Smart. The film will be getting its UK premiere at Manchester Film Festival on March 24, followed by and Q&A with Richard Armitage and director Rebecca Snow. 

Some of the other films that have caught our eye include Sometimes I Think About Dying, a dark rom com starring Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley; La Chimera, a new surrealist comedy from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro), starring The Crown’s Josh O’Conner as a young British archaeology working in Tuscany alongside Isabella Rosselini; and Disco Boy, which is about the intertwining lives of a Foreign Legion fighter in Paris and a guerrilla fighter in the Niger Delta. 

Closing off the festival in style is Kristen Stewart’s latest film, romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding. It is the second feature by director Rose Glass, who impressed critics in 2019 with her indie horror debut Saint Maud. Stewart plays a gym manager with a dark family past who falls for a body-builder. 

How to get tickets

Tickets are available now from the Manchester Film Festival website. You can buy tickets for individual screening, as well as five film passes for £30, 10 passes for £50 or whole festival passes for £79.