Edinburgh International Film Festival: Our Guide to International Cinema and Homegrown Talent

The Edinburgh International Film Festival has become one of our favourite ways to experience Edinburgh in August: ditch the chaos of the Royal Mile and slip into the darkness of the Cameo, Filmhouse, or Cineworld for some world-class cinema.

Now in its third year under the stewardship of Paul Ridd and Emma Boa, EIFF continues to carve out its identity with its competitive slate of world premieres, key selections from the international festival circuit, and interesting repertory screenings. We’ve picked out some of our must-see films below.

---

In Competition

Mission reunites director Paul Wright with actor George MacKay, 13 years on from their collaboration in the former’s feature debut For Those In Peril. MacKay stars as Dylan, a young man who tires of his frictionless existence and begins acting out to alarming extremes.

We’re excited to see Scottish director Wright back on home turf, and by encouraging so much improvisation on set, we could be in for one of MacKay’s nerviest performances yet, no mean feat for an actor whose career is littered with smart choices and left-field turns (Rose of Nevada, The Beast, Femme).

Mission is one of ten world premieres competing for the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence. Another is Joseph Archer’s Snapshot, a found-footage horror that uses a circular aspect ratio to imitate the pinhole camera used during its Victorian setting.

Archer’s film follows a women’s ghosthunting society and has much to say about the spectre of violence and the act of image-making.

---

Also competing is Kieron J. Walsh’s Skintown, based on Ciaran McMenamin’s 2017 novel. It’s a youth-slanted take on the Troubles in which best friends Vinny (Jack Rowan) and Jonty (Chris Walley) take advantage of the 1994 IRA ceasefire to get out of their small town.

Also starring Derry Girls‘ Jamie Lee O’Donnell and featuring a 90s rave soundtrack, Skintown looks to evoke the euphoric highs and bruising lows of adolescence forged under acid house and Operation Banner.

---

Tyler-Marie Evans’ Pretty Babies will also be vying for the top prize. With romantic ideas of Hollywood instilled from a diet of classic films, two teenage girls set off on an impulsive road trip only to find themselves ensnared in Tinseltown’s much seedier underbelly.

Evans has assembled two generations of teen drama royalty for her cast: Pretty Little Liars‘ Ashley Benson, Riverdale‘s Madelaine Petsch, and the Gossip Girl reboot’s Emily Alyn Lind.

---

Out of Competition

EIFF have also made some choice bookings from the international festival circuit. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell stars Charles Melton as Private K, a GI searching for his daughter amidst a spate of murders of young women.

Melton performed with an unbelievable pathos in Todd Haynes’ May December, but we reckon he’ll be drawing more from his years in the Riverdale trenches for this pulpy crime thriller. Winding Refn’s films are known for their extreme violence (Drive, the Pusher trilogy) and their neon-drenched visual language (Only God Forgives, The Neon Demon).

With a score from Pino Donaggio, known for his work on Brian De Palma classics and cult Italian gialli, Her Private Hell looks geared up to be a heady, sensory epic.

---

Also arriving from Cannes is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Sheep in the Box. Kore-eda’s filmography is replete with moving dramas about family relationships – Shoplifters, Our Little Sister, and I Wish, and he’s particularly well-regarded for his work with child actors.

Sheep in the Box circles familiar territory in its depiction of a couple grieving the loss of their son, but their decision to welcome a humanoid robot version of the child into their home introduces a sci-fi element and grapples with questions around AI. Kore-eda’s underseen Air Doll from 2009 also explored notions of agency and sentience in human-like objects, as well as the ethics of building relationships with them.

Neither Her Private Hell nor Sheep in the Box fared well at their Cannes premieres earlier this year, but Kore-eda and Winding Refn are two international auteurs whose new work we simply have to see for ourselves.

---

Meanwhile from Sundance, I Want Your Sex is Gregg Araki’s first feature in over a decade, far too long for the New Queer Cinema pioneer behind Mysterious Skin and the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy. When twenty-something Elliott (Cooper Hoffmann) starts hooking up with his artist boss Erika (Olivia Wilde), Araki brings a trademark irreverence to the unfolding interrogation of sexual and intergenerational politics.

---

Another Sundance pick is Molly Manners’ Extra Geography, a charming-looking coming-of-age story that takes place at a British boarding school. Adapted from Rose Tremain’s short story by writer Miriam Battye (whose work for TV includes Succession and Dead Ringers), Manners’ film captures the complexity and intensity of a friendship between two teenage girls.

---

From creature features to exploitation films, EIFF’s Midnight Madness strand favours horror and action films that skew towards the B-movie tradition, and the chintzy Cameo is the perfect setting for these genre curios. We’ll be staying up late to catch James Nunn’s Hungry, in which a group of tourists get stuck in the Louisiana Bayou with an angry hippo.

With its practical effects and wetlands setting, this man-versus-nature survival thriller harks back to classics like Piranha and looks like ridiculous schlocky fun.

---

We’ll also be needing a long lie (if we can get to sleep at all…) after Faces of Death, Daniel Goldhaber’s reboot of the franchise that started in 1978. Though the original run of films were pseudo-documentaries presented by a pathologist compiling footage of people’s final moments, Goldhaber’s version is a straightforward narrative feature with its own meta twist. Barbie Ferreira stars as Margot, an online content moderator who stumbles on videos resembling scenes from the original Faces of Death.

---

For more bedtime-friendly B-movie antics there’s The Peril At Pincer Point, a whimsical and comedic low-budget folk horror. From Blow Out‘s Jack Terry to Berberian Sound Studio‘s Gilderoy, sound recordist characters in films never seem to have an easy time of it.

Directors Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine follow suit by putting their protagonist Jim (Jack Redmayne) at the mercy of his demanding director. Sent to the titular Pincer Point island on a job, Jim finds himself enthralled by the encounters he has there – sonic and otherwise.

---

Scots Focus

EIFF have upped the ante with new Scottish titles this year, from the aforementioned Mission to the opening and closing films (Louis Paxton’s The Incomer and Louise Lockwood’s Bel). Scottish productions include documentary Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon, queer period piece The Education of Jane Cumming, memoir adaptation Borges and Me, and Scottish Ballet’s These Violent Delights.

---

But it’s the NFTS Sean Connery Lab and Bridging the Gap Shorts programmes, which feature narrative and documentary work from Scotland’s next generation of filmmaking talent, that we’re most excited about.

For the NFTS Sean Connery Lab Shorts, Jagoda Tłok’s Bubbles builds on previous short Care‘s engagement with care work and migrant labour; Iqbal Mohammad’s My Little Blue Heart arrives with unfortunate timeliness in its depiction of a dystopian Britain overrun by racist vigilantes; Fin Bain continues his exploration of the nightlife economy with Shutterbug, swapping the tenderness of Floored‘s medical tent bonding session for a piece about the toxicity of fame; SNACK alumna Lara Delmage’s PANG (main image) charts an adolescent poolside queer awakening.

---

And for Bridging the Gap’s documentary shorts, Matthew Dunsmore’s When the Fires Stop follows the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery; Olive Jones’ Cherry Picker is an experimental work about the horrors of renting in today’s housing crisis; Michael Lee Richardson’s No Place Like Home sees Richardson revisiting childhood favourite Return to Oz and reclaiming Michael Sundin as a formative queer icon.

---

After Gaspar Noé’s surprise presentation of I Stand Alone in 2024 and Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing last year, we’re delighted to see the EIFF team continue their run of feel-bad transgressive repertory screenings with an extremely rare screening of Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q. A prolific director, Visitor Q is one of five Miike films turning 25 this year, and it’s up there with Audition and Ichi the Killer as one of his most notorious.

An early experiment in digital video technology that starts with incest and just gets bleaker from there, Visitor Q makes most other attempts at the ‘dysfunctional family’ drama look like The Brady Bunch.

---

Also celebrating its 25th anniversary with an EIFF screening is Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast. And, for the simple pleasure that is listening to Martin Scorsese talk about cinema, try and carve out four hours of your Saturday afternoon for a screening of his 1995 documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.

Edinburgh International Film Festival runs from 13 August to 19 August