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“I hope in the future we will be seen as a kind of destination festival,” Paul Ridd tells us of his long-term goal for the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), as he pulls away from his work desk for a short break. He’s speaking to us from his home in the Scottish capital and we’re just a few days out from his inaugural edition as festival director.
Central to his plan is a rejig of the festival’s competition strands, which now carry the names of local and global screen icons and strictly debut world premiere titles. There’s also a hefty cash prize.
“You will come here because of the strength of our curation and competitions,” Ridd says.
Another key piece of his puzzle is the festival’s engagement with the industry through its dedicated industry sidebar, set to relaunch this year across the festival’s first weekend, Friday 16 August to Sunday 18 August.
“We want to be a space where people not only want to get their films into selection but also where the press and industry will come and get something out of it that will be beneficial,” Ridd continues.
“That’s the destination festival feel.”
The centerpiece of this year’s industry sidebar will be an onstage Q&A between filmmaker Alex Garland and Edinburgh Film Festival chair Andrew Macdonald. Macdonald, best known as the pioneering local producer behind Trainspotting, has worked with Garland for multiple decades on titles including The Beach (2000), 28 Days Later (2002), Ex Machina (2014), and their recent box office hit Civil War. The pair will discuss their careers and collaborations onstage at Edinburgh’s Tollcross Central Hall, a 750-seat venue that will host the festival’s headline Q&A sessions.
“I think our delegates will get a lot out of that conversation. One of the reasons we wanted to involve Andrew is because we wanted to keep it industry-focused,” Ridd says of the headline gig.
“Andrew is a very well-established producer having made things like Trainspotting. But having worked together with Alex so closely over the years, I think it’s going to make for a conversation not just about the content of the films but also the production, collaboration, and all the things that are central to our ideas.”
Ridd says it was “difficult to pin down” Garland who is an enigma amongst contemporary filmmakers. The 28 Days Later writer has no verifiable online presence (even Martin Scorsese is on Instagram), and he is rarely a fixture on the festival circuit despite directing four films in the last decade.
“It went down to the wire to secure him,” Ridd says. “His schedule is crazy, working on 28 Days Later and the other film he’s co-directing.”
Garland is co-directing Warfare, a highly-guarded A24 project, with Ray Mendoza. The film is set to star Noah Centineo, Taylor John Smith, Adain Bradley, Michael Gandolfini, Henrique Zaga, and Evan Holtzman.
Other headline Q&A sessions include talks with Thelma Schoonmaker and Gaspar Noé. The pair will also present films to the EIFF audience. Noé will introduce a screening of Dario Argento’s Suspiria while Schoonmaker will introduce Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going!.
The rest of the industry section has been filled out with subject-focused panels like Scrapper To Screen, a case study on the development and distribution of the hit 2023 feature Scrapper. Melanie Iredale from the equalities charity Reclaim the Frame will moderate the session. Panelists will be the film’s director Charlotte Regan, Eva Yates (Director of BBC Film), and Julia Trawinska (Acquisitions Manager at Picturehouse Entertainment). The incoming director of the Edinburgh TV Festival Rowan Woods will moderate Stand Up To The Screen, a panel centered around filmmakers who have transitioned from live performance and TV to filmmaking. Alex Walton, Co-Head at WME Independent will feature on the panel alongside producer Afolabi Kuti. But who will be in attendance?
“We’ve got a really good and broad range of people coming, everyone from emerging producers and filmmakers to established execs based in Scotland, the wider UK, and abroad,” Ridd says.
“We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people are coming from very different backgrounds. I think it’s gonna make for some really interesting networking sessions too.”
Alongside its presence within the contemporary industry, EIFF has always maintained a strong connection with the Academy, championing and engaging with film theory and philosophy. That tradition will be upheld this year on the penultimate industry day with a tribute to Lynda Myles. Myles will be presented with the BAFTA Scotland Outstanding Contribution to Film Award at a dinner hosted by the festival.
A producer, writer, curator, and critic, Myles was the first woman to head a major European film festival when she led EIFF from 1973 to 1980. Her tenure is best known for inspired programming that popularized in-depth retrospectives of Hollywood directors like Douglas Sirk and Raoul Walsh whom she placed alongside the contemporary American and European avant-garde. An early champion of women filmmakers, in 1972 Myles created a series of debates and screenings at EIFF titled The Women’s Event, focused entirely on the work of female filmmakers. She left Edinburgh in 1980 for the University of California, Berkeley and shortly thereafter became a producer with credits including The Commitments and Killing Me Softly.
“We loved the idea of the continuity between the old and the new. And Lynda was such an important figure in the festival’s history in that seventies era,” Ridd says of the tribute.
With a series of networking cocktails and the festival’s now-famous cèilidh, the industry sidebar will close with a new addition: a film quiz hosted by radio presenter and critic Ali Plumb.
“I just love the idea that we can create this compelling place where people can discover new work, find talent, and network but also have fun,” Ridd says. “And what’s a film event without a film quiz? We’re all nerds anyway.”
The Edinburgh Film Festival runs from August 15 to August 21.
