Edinburgh Film Festival
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“We Couldn’t Do Our Jobs If We Weren’t Social People”: Diane Henderson on Festival Programming
I’m chastising two filmmakers for walking out of Nanni Moretti’s My Mother, the closing night film at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw. I make some argument about how films, even bad ones, deserve the attention of at least their running times, and I gloat about having suffered through the entirety of Moretti’s newest flop myself. Two weeks later, on my second morning at the Locarno Film Festival, while watching the World Premiere of Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie, which will premiere in the U.S. later this fall at the New York Film Festival, I’m almost amused by the […]
by Taylor Hess on Aug 25, 2015 -
EIFF 2012: ONWARDS & UPWARDS
Scotland looks magnificent in EIFF closing night film Brave — lots of mountains, mystical spaces and torrential waterfalls. Strangely though, it doesn’t rain in the movie. Not once. This decision must have been overseen by the Scottish tourist board, for there are few places as rainy as Scotland. When it rained in Cannes this year, it was all the trades could talk about — but it’s just not news when it happens in Edinburgh. The last two weeks in Edinburgh we have all been dashing from cinema to cinema in raincoats, umbrellas up, wavy hair getting frizzier by the minute. […]
by Hope Dickson Leach on Jul 2, 2012 -
EIFF 2012: IN DEVELOPMENT
We’re over half way through now and I’m starting to panic. I keep hearing about great films that I’ve missed (The Mirror Never Lies is spoken of only in superlatives, and The Unspeakable Act is another one I’m late to the table for, Tabu, Kid-Thing and more) and rocking events that slipped by while I was elsewhere. Chris Fujiwara told me about an event where he and some of the Filipino filmmakers who are in town did a live musical accompaniment to a film, and I don’t know where I was for Thelma Schoonmaker‘s Q&A after a screening of a […]
by Hope Dickson Leach on Jun 28, 2012 -
EIFF 2012: NEW BEGINNINGS
Walking around the opening party you couldn’t help but hear the word “rebirth” a lot. As the most heavily pregnant person in the room, this made me jump, but I soon joined in the celebration. The 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival had just opened with William Friedkin‘s Killer Joe, and the evening was a definite success. Not everyone liked the film — there were questions about on-screen violence towards women in particular — but everyone agreed that as an opener, new festival director Chris Fujiwara had hit the right note. Smacked it right on the kisser, you might say. There […]
by Hope Dickson Leach on Jun 24, 2012 -
Five Questions with Exit Elena Director Nathan Silver
“Sorry to put you in the middle of this,” says Cindy Akerman (Cindy Silver) to Elena (Kia Davis), as they sit at breakfast and she argues with her husband about her decision to hire Elena as a live in nurse for his mother without telling him. And so it begins. At 71 minutes long, filmmaker Nathan Silver’s Exit Elena is an exquisite gem of a movie. We watch as Elena is dragged into the dysfunction of family life and struggles to maintain her professional role looking after the elderly Florence (Gert O’Connell) while her employer drags her along to zumba […]
by Hope Dickson Leach on Jun 21, 2012 -
A Pregnant Pause Before the Reborn Edinburgh Film Festival
When it comes to Edinburgh, I’m no festival virgin. However, this is the first festival in the 15 years I’ve been attending either as staff, filmmaker or delegate, when I will be seven-and-a-half months pregnant. I will be waddling, Marge Gunderson style, from cinema to cinema, hopefully securing seats on the end of the row (leaving me with the perfect excuse to pop out early). I will NOT be quaffing vats of dry white wine, or even whiskey (sob) but that means I will hopefully remember the names of everyone I meet and won’t be dozing off during the more […]
by Hope Dickson Leach on May 31, 2012 -
THE 2011 EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL
Spend even the shortest amount of time in the delightful and disturbing Scottish capital and you begin to read native Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a metaphor for the city itself. Edinburgh boasts a warm and welcoming population residing in an atmosphere where an ever-present hint of menace hangs palpably in the air like its famous rainy mist. (This openness is evidenced by the fact that one early afternoon my sister and I were able to pretty much wander in to a Justice Committee hearing of Parliament debating that day’s front page news […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 28, 2011 -
TILDA SWINTON’S LAUREL & HARDY FLASH MOB DANCE
At the Festival Square in Edinburgh, Tilda Swinton organized and led a flash mob dance yesterday, coinciding the launch of her new charity, the 8 1/2 Foundation. From an article in the Scotsman: Gathering several hundred willing participants under the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, she led them in a soft-shoe shuffle known as At The Ball, by the Avalon Boys, originally performed by Laurel and Hardy, in an effort to create a “flash mob dance”, where a group suddenly and spontaneously start dancing in a public place. The instructions, disseminated online, were simple: watch the Laurel and Hardy clip, turn […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 27, 2010 -
“THE PEOPLE VS. GEORGE LUCAS” TO HIT EDINBURGH, LA, SILVERDOCS AND MUNICH
After hit screenings at SXSW and HotDocs, Alexandre O. Philippe‘s The People vs. George Lucas will be shown at four film festivals this month: Edinburgh International, LA, AFI’s Silverdocs, and Munich. Philippe’s film examines the relationship between filmmaker George Lucas and his fans over the past thirty years. PvG is one of six documentaries at SILVERDOCS nominated for the WGA Documentary Screenplay Award this year. You can catch the film at any of the following screenings: Edinburgh International Film Festival: June 18 @ 7:45pm (Filmhouse 1) June 19 @ 3:30pm (Filmhouse 1) Los Angeles Film Festival: June 23 @ 8:30pm […]
by Jaimie Stettin on Jun 3, 2010 -
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Filmmaker
I’m at the Edinburgh Film Festival, jetlagged bad, and I’m asked for emerging filmmaker advice by some kid. He says, in particular, he wants to know about making art films and being a writer/director. Oh boy. I try to find something to say, but it’s disingenuous and the kid knows it. I go back to the hotel room and roll around in the bed, can’t sleep. The only thing on the T.V. is Michael Jackson’s body bag. I go to the window and look at the ancient castle and the ancient fog and I think about what I would tell […]
by Noah Buschel on Nov 17, 2009
