Web voters share credit for romantic comedy set to shine at film festival

FAINTHEART, a film fashioned by millions of users of an internet networking site, will get its world premiere as the closing-night film of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, it was announced yesterday.

Critics singled out the 1 million budget romantic comedy as one to watch as the festival announced its June line-up.

In a cross between webtv and mainstream film, Faintheart's script, its director, Vito Rocco, and some of the cast, including Scottish actor Ewen Bremner, were driven by votes and comments on the Myspace site. The festival director, Hannah McGill, called it a "small, very very funny, very sweet film".

Ms McGill took her great leap into the unknown yesterday as she announced the programme for her festival opening in June, rather than August, for the first time in its 60-year history.

With a strong animation line-up, the festival hosts the first showing outside the US of the latest film from Pixar, creator of huge hits such as Toy Story. WallE, the story of a loveable robot left alone on Earth, moves away from Pixar's witty scripts towards a silent comedy feel.

By contrast Fear(s] of the Dark has creepy hounds and samurais and is marked "not suitable for children".

The festival's opening film, The Edge of Love, starring Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley, has already been announced, with the actors expected to attend.

Other major names were seeded through the programme – Frances McDormand in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, or Catherine Zeta-Jones, in Death Defying Acts, the film about Harry Houdini, partly filmed in Edinburgh.

Robert Carlyle and Billy Boyd feature in Stone of Destiny, a film about the famous theft of the Stone of Scone in 1950.

Ms McGill said: "We've got a really strong British programme. People who have been to Cannes will have a whole other reason to come to Edinburgh."