Festival cuts

As Edinburgh's movie showcase goes it alone for the first time, Siobhan Synnot brings us the glitterati and the gossip

HAVING made its seismic shift to June, the Edinburgh Film Festival is keen to establish an identity for itself, with artistic director Hannah McGill proposing that this should be viewed as a festival of discovery.

So, discoveries for the diary this week include the practice alluded
to in the title of gruelling festival flick Donkey Punch. Google, if you are curious, but we reckon that if you tried it on a donkey, they'd have to scrape what's left of you off the back of the stable door

The opening premiere of Edge Of Love was nervously anticipating another kind of violent outpouring from Sienna Miller's longterm boyfriend Rhys Ifans, who threatened to gatecrash the event and protest at the end of their relationship. In the end Rhys elected to stay home with his Kleenex and a mug of cocoa, but this would not have been the first time Ifans has been moved to tears in Edinburgh.At the gala screening of Once Upon A Time In The Midlands a few years ago, the Welsh actor was so overwhelmed by his own performance that he left the screening and retreated to the cinema bar where he was collected at the end, red-eyed and weepy.

In any case the Edge Of Love event went off with only minor hitches, such as arranging for Keira Knightley, Sienna and Matthew Rhys to meet the press at Edinburgh Castle in a room with no electricity at the top of a very high narrow staircase following no less than four security checks. The original Karate Kid imposed fewer tests of endurance and commitment but it was worth it in the end to hear the garrulous Miss Knightley tell us how much she likes haggis, a claim that ranks alongside Brigitte Bardot suggesting that on her days off she enjoys a spot of bear-dancing.

On the red carpet, Sir Sean Connery swept past barely acknowledging the press, though waving to the audience, obviously not with the arm that's in a sling. Joely Richardson, meanwhile, eschewed the red carpet altogether to slip in with everyone else.

Across at Cineworld, Terence Davies, one of the great original voices of British cinema, held his audience spellbound with the confessional Q&A which followed his love letter to Liverpool, Of Time And The City. He revealed that he's working on a romantic comedy and still hopes to get his version of Sunset Song off the ground, although oddly the only country reluctant to chip in funding is Britain.

"I was told, 'it won't run'," he recalls. "And the man who said that had just put nigh on £2m into Sex Lives Of The Potato Men. It was a bit hard to swallow."

Every day at the Traverse at 6 pm for the duration of the festival a group of filmmakers and technicians assemble to discuss the business of making movies in a genial and relaxed way. Awardwinning cinematographer Seamus McGarvey regaled the first panel with the story behind Atonement's five-and-a-half-minute single take of James McAvoy trudging through Dunkirk's grim defeat and chaos. What appeared to be bravura filmmaking was actually the product of miscalculating tides and light, according to McGarvey, because director Joe Wright discovered that he had only a brief window of time before the sea rushed in and washed away his set. The original montage of shots had to be abandoned, but the payoff became one of the most memorable and nightmarish cinematic war sequences.

Homegrown Scottish films are at a premium at Edinburgh, so much fuss attended last night's world premiere of Stone Of Destiny, an old-fashioned account of the theft of the stone as told to a small, inattentive and possibly deaf child. It belongs in the same handknitted school as recent movies Greyfriars Bobby, and Loch Ness: attractively shot period kitsch with bagpipes keening in the background. Hot-eared
and earnest, Destiny treats a hunt for car keys in a manner that even Brian de Palmamight regard as a little overblown, and clearly yearns for simpler times when Westminster Abbey was guarded by one old bloke with a torch and Scots attended university until they were 40.

This can be the only explanation for an undergraduate as venerable as Billy Boyd (only seven years younger than Robert Carlyle, who plays the yooni's rector) and Stephen McCole, who had to dye his hair from grey to ginger to play the stone's heavy lifter, Gavin Vernon. Still, you're never too old for a telling off from your maw.

Smoke-free Scotland continues to present challenges to the film industry's committed puffers, and at the Edge Of Love premiere party the balcony favoured by dispossessed tobacco fiends was forcefully cleared so that director John Maybury could enjoy a fag without getting mobbed by all his Love Is The Devil groupies. Suave actor-director Danny Huston, who heads this year's jury, prefers to stick his head out of the car window to smoke, to the mortification of his immaculate mother, actress Zoe Sallis, who could be heard on Lothian Road remonstrating, "Danny, stop that at once".