Tale of failed love leads festival documentaries

A ROCK musician's quest to find out why his old girlfriends all dumped him tops the line-up of 22 documentary films at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival.

In Chris Waitts's award-winning A Complete History of My Sexual Failures the British director attempts to retrace his own romantic history and find a new love interest at the same time.

Critics called the film, in which Waitts even tries to interview a girl he "dated" aged 11, "a comedy of humiliation and haplessness" that was sometimes "screamingly funny".

The film gets its first European showing in the British gala section of the June festival. Another highlight is Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit, who in August 1974 walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre.

The EIFF, which runs from 18-29 June, started life in 1947 as a documentary film festival. There are documentaries from 11 countries this year. "It's an incredibly diverse array of work from a set of extremely talented film-makers – the new as well as the known," said artistic director Hannah McGill.