THERE are several ways of watching Con-Air, director Simon West’s excitable but highly watchable 1997 drama about Nicolas Cage as a prisoner and other airborne convictsabout Nicolas Cage and other airborne convicts. 

You can dig out your DVD copy at home. You can stream it, or you can look for it on your TV listings. 

 Alternatively, you can turn up at the Glasgow Film Theatre on the evening of February 18, take your pre-booked seat on a bus, don a prison boiler suit and be manacled to another film fan;, and be ferried to a secret location, where, monitored by prison guards, you can explore your “top secret surroundings”. 

And Then, and only then, you can settle down to watch the mid-air scenery being chewed by Cage, John Malkovich, Ving Rhames and Steve Buscemi.

It’s part of the innovative Special Events strand at the 2016 Glasgow Film Festival (GFF), which also includes special (and long sold-out) screenings at the Kelvingrove art galleries and museum of two Hollywood classics;, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Silence of the Lambs, both of which take place on the opening Saturday, February 20.

The David Bowie-starring The Man Who Fell to Earth is being screened at Glasgow Science Centre’s Planetarium. Thelma & Louise will go on show at the Grand Ole Opry on the Govan Road, preceded by a line-dancing session; and Sidney Lumet’s influential 1976 media satire, Network, will be shown, free of charge, to 70 people in a BBC Scotland viewing room at Pacific Quay. 

This, of course, is the film in which Peter Finch’s US TV network anchor electrifies audiences by bellowing: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
The strand is the work of 29-year-old Emma McIntyre, a graduate of the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, in Dundee, who is in her second year as event manager of GFF. And, as It is already evident ,that she’s something of an action-film buff, too.

“It’s a way,” she says of the strand, “of taking the cinema into new places or suggesting new experiences or reminding people that cinema is still completely immersive. 

“I love that experience of being encapsulated by a film but we are in a position to really accelerate that;: we can enhance it by screening a film in a venue that really brings out parts of the film. 

“And we can take the audience into totally new places. It means they’re not checking their phones or waiting for it to end. 

“We aim to marry film with venue and I really like to highlight bits of the film that I think are particularly fun or strange: we bring them to life. It’s a sensory experience, really.”

Emma’s own, earliest memories of film, “were something on a scale that I could not quite fathom.

“I later studied art, so for me this sense of complete sensory overload… I get that when I watch an action film. 

“I hold that feeling quite dear: a sensation that I’m not quite used to, or a great visual, like an explosion, or certain colours or a sense of adrenaline.

“When I say the word ‘cinema’, those feelings are what I remember and action films are what introduced them to me. 

“In my position at the festival, that is what I try to offer for any film – those distinct feelings, that real sense of engagement.” 

She remembers (“this might be slightly embarrassing”) once owning video tapes of Terminator 2 and Demolition Man, both of which helped to kickstart her lifelong fascination with action films.

Emma was greatly encouraged by the audience response to last year’s Special Events programme (every film in which was a sell-out) and also to a one-off screening last November of Wim Wenders’ brilliant “city symphony”, Wings of Desire. 

When it was shown at Paisley’s historic Abbey, it was accompanied by experimental musicians, an artist and aerial performers.

“The audience,” sheEmma says now, “seemed to indicate that they wanted more and they will hopefully come to what I am asking of them this year.”

She harbours a particular affection for Steven Spielberg’s flamboyant 1981 hit, Raiders of the Lost Ark and by way of contrast the late-night Kelvingrove screening of Silence of the Lambs will be slightly more subtle.

Kelvingrove’s organ will be used with both films. For details, Go to www.glasgowfilm.org/festival. Box office: 01413- 326535.