Tag Archives: Edinburgh

Features, Film, The Skinny

IberoDocs: 2022 festival preview

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As with basically every UK arts festival in the first five months of 2021, the eighth edition of IberoDocs – Scotland’s main showcase for documentary works from Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-American filmmakers – went fully online in light of lockdowns. For the ninth edition, in-person events in Edinburgh and Glasgow are back on the cards, but lessons from last time haven’t been completely abandoned.

Between 6 and 10 April there will be screenings at those cities’ participating venues, while between 11 and 17 April a selection of the festival programme will move online and be available across the UK. There’ll be one online-exclusive in the form of Bolingo: The Forest of Love – a documentary exploring the journey undertaken by women migrants from the heart of Africa to northern Morocco, searching for the ‘European dream’. Additional accessibility will also come via a number of post-film Q&As featuring BSL interpretation…

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Film, Filmmaker, Interviews

“I Feel Completely Vindicated Now the Film’s Been Made”: Michael Caton-Jones on Our Ladies’s 20+-Year Journey to the Screen

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Things were going well for Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones at the start of 2020. The director of Scandal (1989), This Boy’s Life (1993) and Rob Roy (1995), among many others, Caton-Jones was preparing for the theatrical release of Our Ladies, a passion project he’d been trying to get made for over 20 years. It had received its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2019, where it “played out of this world”, in his words, to an audience of roughly 800 attendees in its first public screening. Flying relatively under the radar in a stacked program largely comprised of Cannes, TIFF and Venice titles, Our Ladies received strong early notices from big publications that did cover it from the festival, including a rave write-up from Sight & Sound and a five-star review from The Times. Following a Scottish premiere for the comedic drama at the Glasgow Film Festival in late February, the movie was scheduled for a saturation release at the end of April.

And then most of the world’s theaters closed indefinitely…

Full interview for Filmmaker

Film, Little White Lies, Reviews

Our Ladies (Michael Caton-Jones, 2019)

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Let’s call Our Ladies one of the new great British teen movies. Its journey to the screen is even older than its riotous protagonists: director and co-writer Michael Caton-Jones first optioned the rights to Alan Warner’s 1998 novel The Sopranos over 20 years ago…

Full review for Little White Lies

BFI, Features, Film

10 to see at the Edinburgh Film Festival 2021

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Moving, for the time being, from June to late August, this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival is also a shorter edition than in pre-pandemic times – a week-long affair running from 18 to 25 August.

As with last autumn’s BFI London Film Festival, EIFF will also be a locally physical and nationally digital hybrid. Unlike that first coronavirus-era edition of LFF, though, every feature programmed is scheduled for at least one theatrical screening at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse or Festival Theatre, with some getting two to three. For those outside of the Scottish capital, most – though not all – of the line-up will also be available to rent digitally through Filmhouse at Home…

Full feature for the BFI

Features, Film, The Skinny

Fokus: Films from Germany Preview

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Now in its fifth year, Fokus: Films from Germany (running from November to January across the country) presents an exciting, eclectic snapshot of the contemporary film scene in Germany. The festival is a partnership between the Goethe-Institut in Glasgow and Edinburgh’s Filmhouse, but the two-month tour of Scotland also incorporates screenings at Byres Theatre in St Andrews, the Hippodrome in Bo’ness, Dundee’s DCA, Ayr Film Society and Aberdeen’s Belmont Filmhouse, plus the GFT as an extra venue in Glasgow.

The opening film – which screens at Filmhouse on 21 Nov before making its way to the other participating venues – is the UK premiere of Bauhaus Spirit: 100 Years of Bauhaus. The documentary, funnily enough, explores the history and lasting influence of the Bauhaus period of art, design and architecture at the time of the school’s 100th anniversary…

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Features, Film, The Skinny

Talk of the Toons: Scotland Loves Anime 2019 preview

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An annual celebration of Japanese animation that takes place at Glasgow Film Theatre and Edinburgh’s Filmhouse, the Scotland Loves Anime festival reaches a milestone 10th edition in October 2019. “It always feels like we’re younger still,” festival director Andrew Partridge tells us. “My, how time flies when you’re stressing about running a festival!”

Regularly showcasing the best new animation from Japan, alongside restorations of established classics and the occasional live-action adaptation of an anime or video game, the festival has gone from strength to strength in terms of audience, reach, influence and programming coups. What was once just a relatively modest attempt to get more Scottish cinema showings for anime – that aren’t just from Studio Ghibli – has become one of the key European animation events on the calendar…

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BFI, Features, Film, Sight & Sound

The bitter and the sweet: British features at Edinburgh 2019

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2019 marked my seventh trip to the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Something I’ve always appreciated about its commitment to new British cinema – and not just through its Michael Powell Award competition – is that it provides a platform for more idiosyncratic examples of independent British cinema that may struggle to get a launch at the grander London Film Festival. And while it’s faced competition from the rising Glasgow Film Festival for specifically Scotland-focused fiction and nonfiction, Edinburgh has always launched interesting fare from across the increasingly divided United Kingdom – from Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) to Matt Palmer’s Calibre (2018), to name but two recent personal favourites.

That said, not every year can be a vintage one when you take a chance on lots of relatively unproven talent, and my experience of this year’s British line-up was that while the pick-ups from overseas A-list festivals were mostly solid to very good (the Toronto-premiering British folk horror Gwen, now opening in UK cinemas, stood tall), the festival’s own finds were underwhelming so far as the fiction films went…

Full feature for Sight & Sound

BFI, Features, Film

10 to see at the 2019 Edinburgh International Film Festival

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The Edinburgh International Film Festival, the world’s longest continuously-running film festival and now in its 73rd year, runs between 19 and 30 June. It opens with the European premiere of Boyz in the Wood (2019), which is not a tribute to the late John Singleton but rather a dark, folk horror-influenced comedy set in the Scottish Highlands, from writer-director Ninian Doff. The world premiere of Mrs. Lowry & Son (2019) closes the festival: Adrian Noble’s light-hearted biopic of L.S. Lowry (Timothy Spall) portrays the painter long before he was established as one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, devoted to but frustrated with his bitter mother, Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave).

Beyond the bookend galas, there are many premieres (including world-first screenings of 18 features), discoveries and retrospectives of note. Here are 10 highlights from the packed programme…

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Features, Film, The Skinny

Scotland Loves Anime 2018

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Bar the occasional big screen outing for kids’ brands like the Teen Titans and My Little Pony, Hollywood has largely given up on releasing 2D feature animation in cinemas. And with the exception of recent European efforts like Ethel & Ernest, the best place for more traditional animation styles to thrive remains in the East, particularly in Japan. Anime on the big screen in Britain has become a big business thanks to successful limited runs via distributors Anime Limited and Manga UK, especially with 2016’s worldwide smash Your Name. The Scotland Loves Anime festival, returning for its ninth instalment at Glasgow Film Theatre and Edinburgh’s Filmhouse, is the best place for the unfamiliar and hardcore enthusiasts alike to get their biggest and most diverse dose of the medium…

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BFI, Features, Film, Sight & Sound

Local Heroes: new Scottish features at Edinburgh 2018

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Before launching its full programme, the 72nd Edinburgh International Film Festival announced the films in the lineup with notable Scottish connections. It’s standard practice for this festival, presumably tied to obligations to sponsors such as Creative Scotland, to give the slate of local productions a profile-boost before breaking out the international big guns.

Of late, this tease has proved more foreboding than enticing. With a few exceptions (such as Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio), the quality of British features receiving their world premiere at the festival in recent years has been especially patchy, and a number of the particularly dire ones have, in my experience, been those with a local connection. Romantic comedy Scottish Mussel (2015) may still be the worst feature I’ve seen at any film festival.

This year’s Scots-focused preview looked more promising, however, both for the world premieres as well as titles accruing buzz from festivals abroad. Despite the odd dud, the quality, variety and, in some cases, ambition of the features under the broad banner of Scottish filmmaking proved reflective of the state of this year’s programme as a whole…

Full feature for Sight & Sound