Swinton joins spirituality festival with cinema tribute to war doctor

Published on Tuesday 7 July 2009 22:04

OSCAR-winning actor Tilda Swinton has joined the Edinburgh festivals line-up in a cinematic tribute to the psychiatrist who famously treated poet Siegfried Sassoon and other First World War soldiers for shellshock.

Swinton is a star attraction of this summer's Festival of Spirituality and Peace, a small but rapidly-growing feature of the August festival scene.

Other leading guests announced yesterday range from the Liberal Democrat's popular Treasury spokesman, Vincent Cable MP, to the culture chief and broadcaster John Tusa. The festival, based at St John's Church in the West End, doubled its audience to about 20,000 people last year and hopes for another big increase in 2009.

The programme includes ten events at Edinburgh Central Mosque, which is sponsoring the festival financially for the first time.

"The ethos is about ideas and discussion," said director Donald Reid. "We are not trying to push books or sell seats to make a profit. We are not commercially orientated at all.

"It has a different focus and may be one that is fit for the time."

Swinton's event is centred on a screening of The War Requiem, the film of Benjamin Britten's acclaimed opera, directed by the late Derek Jarman, with whom she frequently worked.

The film depicts soldiers such as Sassoon and fellow poet Wilfred Owen, treated in the former Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh by Dr WHR Rivers.

The screening at Edinburgh's Filmhouse will feature readings by Swinton and others of letters between Sassoon and Rivers.

It is a tribute to Dr Rivers' work in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the Rivers Centre later set up in his name at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Morningside.

"We are hoping it will be a really touching occasion," said the film-maker and writer Mark Cousins, Swinton's collaborator on several film projects. "The main purpose is to say he was a great pioneer."

Swinton appears in the 1989 film as a war nurse and other roles alongside the legendary Laurence Olivier.

She is coming to the capital for the screening although she missed the film festival last month, of which she is a prominent patron. She was working on the set of her latest film in Berlin.

The Festival of Spirituality and Peace took shape in 2005 in response to the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq, and unveiled its programme yesterday on the anniversary of the London 7/7 bombings.

The events at the Central Mosque range from exploring the meaning of fasting in the month of Ramadan to Islam's view on Jerusalem.

The festival is also hosting Margaret Atwood at it's base in St John's Church in her Edinburgh International Book Festival event.

The Scottish Government has backed the festival with 50,000. "There are many festivals in Edinburgh, and it's quite appropriate that we should celebrate faith and spirituality," said justice minister Kenny MacAskill.

CROSSING THE RELIGIOUS DIVIDE

THE Call of Home is the theme of this year's Festival of Spirituality and Peace, but many events are centred on the troubled economy and crossing the religious divide.

Farkhanda Chaudhry, the first Muslim Justice of the Peace in Scotland, talks on Women, Islam and Liberation, while British writer Idris Tawfiq, a Roman Catholic priest before he converted to Islam, talks on his beliefs.

Financial scandals in high finance and politics are the subject of Vince Cable MP's keynote talk on The Root of All Evil?

Former Newsnight presenter and BBC World Service chief John Tusa tackles the subject of Creativity with the Scottish hairdressing boss Charlie Miller.

The festival is hosting author Margaret Atwood in its base at St John's Church, in an Edinburgh International Book Festival event that is already sold out.

It has also linked up to The World venue in the Fringe, with music from Sri Lanka, Cuba, Brazil and Ethiopia.