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All official communications from the 2024 Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) organizers have described this year’s edition as “revamped” or “revitalized” — a pointed note to signpost that new management is at the helm. The declaration is perhaps odd for an event that has often trumpeted its heritage, self-styling as the world’s “oldest continuously running film festival.” For the past two years, however, Edinburgh has been at the center of a significant period of turbulence within the Scottish film industry.
All the chaos can be traced back to the finances of Scotland’s Centre for the Moving Image (CMI), which collapsed in 2022. At the time, a statement from CMI executives said a “perfect storm” of rising costs and falling admissions numbers due to the pandemic had been exacerbated by the current cost of living crisis. As part of the CMI’s closure, operations at EIFF were shut down. The Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen, and Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh, the charity’s two celebrated physical cinema sites, also shut their doors. Both venues have since relaunched and rebranded thanks to successful local campaigns.
The EIFF brand, however, was retrieved by Screen Scotland, a national funding body, allowing for a scaled-back 2023 edition under temporary programme director Kate Taylor. Veteran Scottish producer Andrew Macdonald (Trainspotting) was later drafted in to lead a new executive board responsible for the festival, and their first move in the post was a popular one. Paul Ridd, a well-regarded, long-time acquisitions exec at Picturehouse Cinemas, was named festival director.
“We’re inheriting this very illustrious, complicated history of 70-plus years of the festival,” Ridd tells Deadline from his new base in the Scottish capital. “The festival has been through some difficult times recently. It’s been down to us, our board, and my team to make it feel like we’re truly reigniting this thing and making people feel confident that what we’re delivering is an exciting event that is sustainable for the future.”
This year’s edition will open on August 15 with German filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt’s latest feature The Outrun, starring Saoirse Ronan, and close on August 21 with the world premiere of Carla J. Easton and Blair Young’s new documentary Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands. Over the week, the festival will screen more than 80 films across four sections.
“We had 2500 films submitted to us, including shorts and features,” Ridd explains. “Hundreds of films were also submitted directly to us through our relationships with producers and filmmakers.”
The festival’s international feature competition, now dubbed the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, will screen 10 films, all world premieres — a strategic decision by Ridd and his programming team.
“We set out early on with the principle that all our competing shorts and features would need to be world premiers,” Ridd says.
“There’s two reasons for that. One is that we want our audience to feel like a good portion of the selection from competition to out-of-competition is completely new work that hasn’t been screened elsewhere. So there’s a sense that when you see a film with us, you are potentially some of the first public eyeballs to see it. And then, from an industry perspective, it is useful when attracting press and industry folk.”
The competition features a bold mix of international arthouse fare alongside what could be described as more traditional, audience-friendly movies — a mix that could also be used to describe Ridd’s house style during his tenure at Picturehouse. Titles include Nina Conti’s comedy Sunlight, Kurdish political documentary All The Mountains Give, and American filmmaker Kelsey Taylor’s To Kill A Wolf, a reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood set in snowy Oregon.
All competition premieres and headline screenings will take place at Cameo 1, the 250-seat main screen at the Picturehouse-run Cameo Cinema on Home Street. The Cameo will serve as the festival’s hub. The century-old cinema is one of the original EIFF venues and has hosted some of the festival’s most seminal moments, including a 1953 lecture by Orson Welles. Films will then go on to screen at what the festival has described as “non-traditional cinema spaces” across the city like the Summerhall arts venue and Inspace, a contemporary events and exhibition space tied to the University of Edinburgh. The new venues are part of the festival’s new partnership with the Fringe Festival, the Scottish capital’s historic performing arts event, which we announced back in March.
“With something like our opening film, The Outrun, we’re thrilled that Saoirse and the film team will be coming. So they will first go and screen the film at the Cameo,” Ridd explains. “And then they will move around our additional satellite venues, Summerhall, Inspace, and 50 George Square. So they’ll be showing the film in radically different spaces on the same night.”
Those plans will come with obvious logistical concerns, particularly in a busy, cobble-stoned city in Edinburgh. But they also best display the ambition at the center of Ridd’s “revitalization” project.
“We’re trying to make it so that as much as possible, every film in our selection screens once in each venue,” Ridd says.
Tickets to film festival screenings will also be available to buy on the Fringe festival’s popular app. The partnership between the two organizations surprised many across the local industry but has been widely regarded as a smart move for EIFF. Ridd says he believes “by virtue of proximity to other Fringe venues”, new audiences “will take a chance on a film” and seek out something new in their programme. Is his theory too idealistic? Perhaps. Unless you’ve passed through the Scottish capital in August, it’s difficult to explain the scale of Fringe festival. The city is overrun by millions of visitors attempting to hustle their way into already oversubscribed comedy shows and sketch performances. There’s very rarely much oxygen for other events in the city to breathe. Fringe has grown to such prominence that it has far eclipsed the Edinburgh International Festival, the city’s original summer arts event, which takes places across the same period and features classical music and dance performances. So will EIFF really be able to pull in new audiences?
“Many of the competition films are coming from completely new voices and don’t have the obvious traditional hooks,” Ridd explains, “But there are titles like Sunlight by Nina Conti, a very well-established Fringe performer. So there are hooks there within even the competition itself. Plus there are films like Lilies Not for Me that have cast members that are familiar from Netflix shows and Prime shows.”
Ridd continues: “Around the competition, we’ve also got films that have those hooks like The Outrun with Saoirse Ronan. We’ve also got stuff like Between the Temples, which stars Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane. Then there’s Armand, which has Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person In The World. And because of the renewed Fringe collaboration we consciously targeted films that feature stars who are familiar with the Fringe comedy scene, so you have stuff like Alice Lowe’s film Time Stalker.”
The titles Ridd mentions here will be screened in the festival’s out-of-competition slots. There are 18 out-of-competition films, the most high-profile being A24’s Sing Sing, starring Colman Domingo, which screens as a European premiere, and Sky Cinema’s The Radley’s, a world premiere title starring Kelly Macdonald and Damian Lewis. Adapted from Matt Haig’s novel by comedian Jo Brand and writer Talitha Stevenson, the pic tells the story of a seemingly ordinary family with a dark secret: they are vampires. They choose not to drink blood despite their natural cravings until one day they are exposed.
“I was so thrilled that they agreed to give us the world premiere,” Ridd says of Sky Cinema, which is releasing the film in the UK. “We’ve received so much trust and goodwill from the industry with big films like this coming to us and having a discussion about world premieres. It’s been incredibly encouraging because we’re a new entity.”
Alongside the crowdpleasing titles, there are also some challenging films out-of-competition like the 2024 Cannes Un Certain Regard main prize winner Black Dog by Guan Hu and Bogancloch, the latest from experimental British artist Ben Rivers. The same can be said for the festival’s inaugural midnight madness section, which opens and closes with two buzzy UK premieres, Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. Other Midnight Madness films include Kit Redstone and Arran Shearing’s Rotterdam title King Baby and Damian Mc Carthy’s Oddity.
The winner of the Sean Connery Prize will take home £50,000. The award, rebranded earlier this year, is a collaboration between the festival and the Sean Connery Foundation.
“Jason Connery has a strong relationship with the festival going back years,” Ridd explains. “And, of course, his father had a strong relationship with the festival.”
Edinburgh’s new shorts competition, now named after legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker, carries a £15,000 cash prize. Both competitions, however, will be decided by an audience vote rather than a jury.
“It was important for me personally for the prizes to be awarded by audience votes rather than by jury because it’s a vote of confidence in the film,” Ridd says.
“We’re trying to give all of these films the best possible opportunity to be seen for the first time by audiences in the UK, with the hope and belief that they go on to have a life beyond the festival, in cinemas or at home or wherever it is.”
He adds: “That, I think, is the paramount importance of festivals.”
