So long, and thanks for all the haggis
I was saddened to hear last month that the Edinburgh Film Festival had died.
It was shut down suddenly on October 6 with an announcement from the charity that had run it since 2010. The Centre for the Moving Image had ceased trading, and its two cinemas, Edinburgh’s Filmhouse and its sister venue in Aberdeen, were closed. “The charity is facing the perfect storm of sharply rising costs, in particular energy costs, alongside reduced trade due to the ongoing impacts of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis,” the CMI said in a statement, adding that “there was no option but to take immediate action.”
Unless something dramatic happens, it will turn out that the festival’s 75th edition, which was held in August, will have been its last. Founded in 1947 by the Edinburgh Film Guild, it had billed itself as the world’s oldest continually running film festival. The cinemas and the film festival trademark are on the market, so there is at least hope a savior will come to the rescue.
I had the pleasure of attending the Edinburgh festival only one time, but it was memorable.
It was the summer of 1998, and the Missus and I were newly wed and spending several months in the wilds of southwest Ireland. Given that we really didn’t go away anywhere else during that period, I guess you could say, technically, that this was our honeymoon. We had a lovely drive across Ireland, from Kerry to Larne, which is about 20 miles north of Belfast, where we caught a ferry across the North Channel to Cairnryan, Scotland. We lucked into an amazing inn in the middle of nowhere that was welcoming and quite reasonable with the local whiskey.
After a stop in Glasgow to visit a cousin of the Missus, we arrived in the Scottish capital. The place was mad. At that time, the film festival and the city’s famous Festival Fringe were held simultaneously, and raucous crowds cavorted on every street and in every nook and cranny. Edinburgh was so crowded that it had been impossible to book a room for the entire week, so I had ended up booking separate nights in a couple of B&Bs and, for the final night, a hostel just off the Royal Mile.
We spent the week cramming in all the usual tourist things—Edinburgh Castle, the Scotch whisky museum, Holyrood Palace, the Scott Monument (no relation), sampling of the haggis—and even managing to get our photo taken with me in a kilt and herself in a long tartan skirt. Somehow in between all that, I also managed to take in 11 movies, two short films and a Q&A with one of my favorite directors. When you throw in the eight festival films I had already seen at other fests (and a couple I had seen which had already opened in the US) plus the ten festival films I subsequently caught in other places, I actually managed to see a good chunk of the schedule from that 15-day film fest.
You can see the complete list of the flicks I saw (with links to my reviews) by clicking here. Notable flicks at the festival included Todd Haynes’s Safe and Velvet Goldmine, Walter Salles’s Central Station, Roger Michell’s Titanic Town, Peter Lichtefeld’s Trains and Roses, Michael Shamberg’s Souvenir, Ming-liang Tsai’s The Hole, Joe Carnahan’s Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (afterward he actually sent me an appreciative email to thank me for my review), Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art, Denis Villenueve’s August 32nd on Earth (his debut feature), Ana Kokkinos’s Head On, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (his debut feature), François Ozon’s Sitcom and Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals.
The festival highlight for me, though, was a program called Scene by Scene: Terry Gilliam. The director was there to screen his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the evening was spent in an extended conversation (punctuated by clips from his new movie as well as from his classic Brazil) with a BBC radio critic by the name of Mark Kermode. I didn’t know Kermode from Adam, so there is no way I could have suspected I would spend many subsequent years listening to his reviews and discussions with legendary presenter Simon Mayo (also an author) on their weekly BBC film podcast. The pair are still at it to this day, although this past year the podcast left the BBC and went commercial.
It was a great evening and a great insight into one of the true cinematic visionaries. As I look back at what I wrote about it at the time, I am intrigued by this: “Gilliam (the lone Yank in the Monty Python troupe and their premier animator) said he was still recovering from the experience of working on his latest movie and hadn’t even thought about what his next project might be.” His next feature (The Brothers Grimm) would appear seven years later, but we know from the documentary Lost in La Mancha that at the time of that Edinburgh festival Gilliam had been trying for nearly a decade to get his Don Quixote movie made. It would be two more decades before the appearance of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Is Cervantes’s knight errant an appropriate symbol for the fate of the lamented Edinburgh Film Festival? Or maybe I have a better one.
The Missus and I spent our last night in Edinburgh in a hostel charmingly named the Fleshmarket Lodge. We slept in bunk beds, just as if we were college students. Sleep was impossible the entire night because of the outside din from non-stop Fringe revelers. Our accommodation was located on a narrow street so steep that it was actually a long set of steps. An endless game of seeing how many times an empty beer bottle could be made to bounce down the steps ensured endless echoes of breaking glass.
At daylight we arose wearily and made ready for the journey back to Ireland. When we surveyed the damage outside the front door, it was no surprise that the steps were littered with copious quantities broken glass. What was a surprise, though, was the passed-out young Scotsman lying prone amid all the debris, bare legs splayed from under his kilt.
As that inebriated laddie surely did (however many hours later), let us hope that the Edinburgh Film Festival will someday soon rouse and then rise once again.
-S.L., 21 November 2022
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