Is British cinema dead in the water? Edinburgh 2010 report

Trevor Johnston heads north to Edinburgh for the annual film festival to discover whether, after three years as ‘a festival of discovery’ in June not August, the event is continuing to find any new gems of British cinema

Those posters always looked like they might come back to haunt the Edinburgh International Film Festival. All over the city, red lettering listed highlights from years gone by, from ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘Blade Runner’ to ‘Amores Perros’ and ‘The Hurt Locker’, all the while posing the pertinent (if somewhat under-punctuated) question ‘2010 what will you discover?’. The answer, it became apparent, was that British cinema’s current crop indicates an industry in a creative funk, and since the homegrown section provided the bulk of the world premieres at the sixty-fourth festival, many of the (ahem) discoveries were less than inspiring.

Of course, one can hardly blame Hannah McGill, the event’s artistic director, for the fact that the standard of the British titles in competition for the Michael Powell Award was probably at its lowest since the prize was first awarded back in 1993. Usually, there’s at least one highlight worthy of the accolade (as in last year, when Duncan Jones’s ‘Moon’ shone brightly), yet this time, flawed undertakings and outright mediocrity were the order of the day.

Could the jury really give a prize to ‘SoulBoy’? Shimmy Marcus’s coming-of-age story set in and around Wigan Casino’s ’70s Northern Soul scene was likeable, but the travails of Martin Compston’s fleet-footed protagonist offered only unreconstructed clichés. Or how about ‘Cherry Tree Lane’, the latest from ‘London to Brighton’ director Paul Andrew Williams? It proved a home-invasion thriller along the lines of a British suburban ‘Funny Games’, but with only-too-obvious class-tension point-making replacing Haneke’s intellectual rigour.

Among the other contenders, Ashley Horner’s erotic idyll ‘brilliantlove’ had sexual forthrightness in its favour but was stymied by weak performances, Karl Golden’s ‘Pelican Blood’ mixed birdwatching, self-harm and obsessive romance to limited effect, while TV comic Ben Miller’s debut feature, ‘Huge’, about the lower depths of the comedy circuit, was so ill focused one watched with bemusement not amusement. In the event, the winner of the Michael Powell was Nick Whitfield’s absurdist drama ‘Skeletons’, which must have got the nod for ambition over achievement.

If the inadequacies of the British films cast a pall over everything else, the opening gala of Sylvain Chomet’s instant animated classic ‘The Illusionist’ was one to remember for good reasons. Adapted from an unfilmed Jacques Tati script, this story of a struggling magician and a waif he adopts on his Scottish travels was exquisite and heart-rendingly affecting, its evocation of late 1950s Edinburgh drawing gasps of wonder from the audience.

Frankly, this was a hard act to follow, and as the festival unfolded, it became apparent that the films that arrived with UK distribution already in place outclassed the unheralded odds and sods the organisers over-sold in the brochure. Juan José Campanella’s Argentine epic of love and paranoia ‘The Secret in Their Eyes’ showed itself worthy of its Best Foreign Film Oscar, and Corneliu Porumboiu’s philosophical Romanian procedural ‘Police, Adjective’ was spellbinding. Rafi Pitts’s cop-killing suspenser ‘The Hunter’ stood as perhaps the most ideologically forthright film ever shot in Iran, while the documentary strand too delivered contrasting gems in ‘Restrepo’, a front-line report from the US Army in Afghanistan so intense it left me shaky on my feet, and ‘Nénette’, another masterly film from ‘Etre et Avoir’ auteur Nicolas Philibert, which turned a portrait of a zoo-bound orang-utan into a rich meditation on humanity, mortality and cinema.

So, some happy discoveries, then, but another middling year, where the bright spots did little to dispel a sense of looming crisis. With the £1.9 million grant from the UKFC to assist the move from August to June now used up, the sponsorship and funding situation unlikely to improve and the influential Sheffield Doc/Fest moving to June in 2011, the squeeze looks to be on as the EIFF undergoes restructuring involving the appointment of a chief executive to head its new umbrella outfit, the Centre for the Moving Image.

Interesting times, then, since the challenge to maintain a ‘festival of discovery’ ethos while sustaining box-office figures crucial to financial health will be tricky. Edinburgh’s vitality remains essential to Britain’s celluloid landscape, but one would hope, or pray, that next year’s Britflick crew give us something more to celebrate. 

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