I remember the shock when Alfred Hitchcock died. For film fans in Edinburgh, Scotland and further afield, Thursday was a similar body blow. The city’s great cultural cinema, Filmhouse, and its august Edinburgh international film festival have both ceased trading.
Martin Scorsese, Maggie Cheung, the Coen Brothers, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lynne Ramsay, Leslie Caron, Steve Martin, Bill Forsyth, Derek Jarman, Thelma Schoonmaker, Michael Powell and many others went to Filmhouse like moths to a flame, seeking what I sought when I first went in 1984: a place to come out as movie lover. An exhilaration, and a harbour in which to shelter and from which to sail.
