The Edinburgh International Film Festival returns for its 78th edition in August, with the very welcome news that one of its host venues will be the recently reopened Filmhouse. In a programme replete with premieres, retrospective screenings, and talks from special guests, we’ve handpicked a few that we’ll be making a beeline for.
In April 2024 the Iranian director Sepideh Farsi reached out to Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona, recognising their shared positionality as women and visual artists from the Middle East with ‘lives conditioned by walls and wars’. Farsi’s resulting documentary, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, charts their burgeoning friendship and showcases Hassona’s photographs of contemporary Gaza.
In April this year Hassona’s life, career, and friendship with Farsi were cut short when she and ten members of her family were killed by an Israeli airstrike on their home, days after the completion of Farsi’s film. A damning record of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza that follows in the footsteps of last year’s From Ground Zero, giving artists in the territory a platform to depict the untenable conditions Israel is subjecting them to.
Fresh from picking up Best Screenplay at Cannes, EIFF brings us the international premiere of Young Mothers, from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Rosetta, The Kid With a Bike). Given that their previous films have concentrated on a single character or pair, this ensemble piece observing five young mothers in a supported housing unit feels like a novel expansion for the Belgian filmmaking duo. What’s sure to remain intact are their humanistic instincts, centering the points of view of characters who are normally pushed to the margins.
Nadia Fall’s debut, Brides, centres on Doe and Muna, two fifteen-year-old British Muslims who leave their seaside town behind and set out for the Syria of 2014. Dee and Muna’s journey is partially inspired by Shamima Begum’s – given the shameful treatment Begum received, and the Islamophobia at play in today’s United Kingdom, Brides’ engagement with the issue of radicalisation feels particularly bold.
But this audaciousness is offset by its focus on the tenderness of Doe and Muna’s friendship and the thrills of their journey – Fall has cited Thelma & Louise as one of her favourite films. By employing road movie and coming-of-age tropes, Brides injects a welcome dose of empathy into the dehumanising discourse around ‘ISIS brides’.
For more coming-of-age stories there’s Ireland’s Christy, in which a 17-year-old shacks up with his half brother after being kicked out of his foster home, and Slovenia’s Little Trouble Girls, in which sixteen-year-old Lucia joins her Catholic school’s girls’ choir and experiences a sexual awakening.
We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to this year’s retrospective screenings, but Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, in which Kate Dickie plays CCTV operator Jackie, is top of our list. When Jackie recognises someone on one of her monitors, she indulges an unhealthy desire to track them down and right a past wrong. Arnold’s 2006 debut, titled after the now-demolished high-rise flats the film is set in and around, is a tense and visually striking film, unafraid to capture Glasgow in all its grime and glory.
Arnold gives the well-worn cinematic preoccupations of voyeurism and obsession an update for the New Labour years, from the expansion of the surveillance state under Tony Blair to musical cues from the likes of Lady Sovereign and Oasis. Arnold takes part in an In Conversation event later that same day, an opportunity to hear from one of British working-class cinema’s most uncompromising voices.
We’re also looking forward to 1957’s World War II drama The Cranes Are Flying, from the director-cinematographer pair (Mikhail Kalatozov and Sergey Urusevsky) that produced some of Soviet cinema’s most astonishing images. And during Edinburgh’s busiest month for tourists, a 40th anniversary screening of Restless Natives – a comedy about two Wester Hailes teenagers who decide to hold up tourist buses – could not be better programmed.
The Edinburgh International Film Festival runs from 14th–20th August. Full programme and tickets at edfilmfest.org/whats-on/
