Hay to ‘stabilise’ film festival

A FORMER chief executive of Scottish Screen is being brought in to help stabilise the Edinburgh International Film Festival after a turbulent 18 months that has seen the departure of a string of key staff, a major funding crisis and plummeting box office sales.

Ken Hay, who lost his job when the agency was merged with the Scottish Arts Council to form Creative Scotland, has been appointed interim chief executive of the festival after the sudden resignation of former BBC executive Gavin Miller after just over a year in the job.

Mr Hay, who has been running his own consultancy, is the second key appointment to be made in the space of a week after it was revealed Japanese-American writer Chris Fujiwara would be the festival’s new artistic director. He will remain in post until a permanent chief executive is appointed and can start in the post.

Mr Fujiwara is not able to work on his post full-time until December and the festival’s board says Mr Hay is being brought in to help “support” the new artistic director. It emerged last week that the festival’s sales had dropped more than 10 per cent for the second year in a row. The event’s budget was also slashed from £1.2 million in 2010 to just £600,000 last year.

Mr Hay was chief executive at Scottish Screen from 2005 and had been expected to stay on at Creative Scotland, one of the principal funders of the film festival, before his departure was announced last June. Creative Scotland last night said it had nothing to do with his new appointment.

Leslie Hills, chair of the board of the film festival’s parent body, Centre for the Moving Image, said: “Ken Hay brings excellent, long-standing expertise and has specialist knowledge of the screen industries.”