Edinburgh Film Festival boasts 23 world premieres

Published on Wednesday 6 May 2009 22:02

THE Edinburgh International Film Festival unveiled a programme boasting a record 23 world premieres from 31 countries yesterday, including five new Scottish films.

Highlights include Spread, the first Hollywood outing by David MacKenzie, the Scottish director, and Adam, the closing-night film, a romantic comedy centred on a man with Asperger's syndrome, starring Hugh Dancy.

Disney's new feature documentary The Crimson Wing, the story of African pink flamingoes, sits alongside director Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, starring porn actor Sasha Grey as a high-class Manhattan call girl.

Guest speakers include former film producer Lord Puttnam and Roger Corman, the veteran cult film-maker who made his name in low-budget horror, and whose work is the subject of this year's retrospective.

The festival also features many low-budget, independent and foreign productions that are struggling for cinema space as distributors cut back.

The festival's artistic director, Hannah McGill, said the selection showed how "very small teams of film-makers with very small budgets can make films that look really stunningly professional".

"We definitely had an eye this year on exposing a lot of new and first-time film-makers," she said.

They include people like the Edinburgh writer and director Justin Molotnikov, with his first feature film, Crying with Laughter, starring Stephen McCole as a stand-up comedian with a joke that goes badly wrong.

Other stars due to appear this year include Sam Mendes, whose film Away We Go opens the festival on 17 June, Darren Aronofsky, about to direct the new RoboCop film, and Local Hero director Bill Forsyth.

Alastair Harkness - Away we go with a robust and exciting cinematic programme

THIS year's full line-up already seems significantly stronger and more confident than its immediate predecessor.

Put that down to artistic director Hannah McGill bolstering the festival's noble efforts to discover new talent with a raft of genuinely exciting talking-point films and guests.

New work from the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Andrea Arnold (who follows up Red Road with Fish Tank), Sam Mendes (whose new film Away We Go opens proceedings) and festival regular Shane Meadows are the most obvious cinematic highlights – although the British premiere of Kathryn Bigelow's hard-rocking Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker, her first film in seven years, currently tops my can't-wait-to-see list.

New filmmakers will doubtless emerge from the event, but what's heartening about the presence of such already-established directors is that their new movies seem to have been included as much for their artistic merit as for the cachet of their creators' names. Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, for instance, is another of his low-budget experimental dramas and was shot in just 15 days during last October's US presidential election race.

That sentiment certainly sums up the ethos of the festival's retrospective choice this year: Roger Corman wrote the book on low-budget filmmaking. He'll be in attendance to discuss his influential career as a director of trash art and a producer responsible for giving early career breaks to the likes of Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, and another of this year's EIFF special guests: Joe Dante.

There's a bit of a Scottish homecoming feel as well, with an interview with Local Hero's writer/director Bill Forsyth, a screening of Bill Douglas's final film, Comrades, an anniversary screening of Shallow Grave and the UK premiere of Spread, Hallam Foe director David Mackenzie's Hollywood debut, which stars Ashton Kutcher as a young hustler who gets through life by seducing needy older women (Demi Moore doesn't feature).

Also worth looking out for are: Superbad director Greg Mottolo's Adventureland; blaxploitation spoof (and Sundance hit) Black Dynamite; stop-motion adult animation film Max and Mary; Dario Argento's Adrien Brody-starring serial killer thriller Giallo.

And finally there's Moon, a Solaris-esque descent into lunar madness starring Sam Rockwell and directed by first-time Brit director Duncan Jones, whose interest in space travel seems oddly fitting. His dad is David Bowie.