The Edinburgh film festival, which until recently faced the threat of permanent shutdown, has announced the complete lineup for its 2023 edition.
The festival plans to show 36 features – 24 of which are new – over six days in August, having shifted its dates from June to return to its traditional late summer berth that coincides with the rest of the city’s large-scale festival activity.
Alongside previously announced opening film Silent Roar, the festival will host the world premieres of Choose Irvine Welsh, a documentary about the celebrated Scottish author of Trainspotting, Porno and Skagboys, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a hybrid theatre-film adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson story from The Levelling director Hope Dickson Leach. The closing film slot has been given to Fremont, a drama about an Afghan immigrant living in California directed and co-written by British-Iranian film-maker Babak Jalali.
Edinburgh will also host screenings of films that have already made a splash on the international festival circuit, including Christian Petzold’s comedy drama Afire, about a writer forced to share a holiday home, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, featuring Michelle Williams as a ceramicist dogged by anxiety, Ira Sach’s love triangle drama Passages, with Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Your Fat Friend, a film about plus-sized activist Aubrey Gordon by Seahorse director Jeanie Finlay.
Special events planned by the festival include The Lynda Myles Project, a study-cum-tribute to the former director of the Edinburgh film festival and latterly film producer (with The Commitments, The Snapper and The Life of Stuff among her credits), a 20-year anniversary screening of Shane Meadows’ cult thriller Dead Man’s Shoes, and a retrospective of “rebellious voices in American indie cinema”, including Wayne Wang’s Life Is Cheap… But Toilet Paper is Expensive and Bette Gordon’s Variety. The festival is also taking over Edinburgh university’s Old College for a series of outdoor showings of hit films, including The Lego Movie, Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
The festival was threatened with closure after the Centre for the Moving Image, the charity that operated it as well as the Filmhouse cinema chain in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, collapsed into administration in October. Government agency Screen Scotland bought the film festival’s trademark from the administrators, and with the collaboration of the Edinburgh international festival – the organisation that stages the city’s large scale music and theatre events in the summer – was able to mount the 2023 edition under new programme director Kate Taylor, albeit in a considerably slimmer format than in recent years. Its 36 films this year compares with over 90 last year, and about 120 in its last pre-pandemic event in 2019.
The Edinburgh film festival runs from 18 to 23 August.
