Small is beautiful

We must encourage festivals, such as Edinburgh, that are less industry-driven and more geared towards the film-viewing public, says Dave Calhoun

‘Reminds you of Cannes, doesn’t it?’ jokes another critic as we trudge up Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge Road to the glamour of the Cineworld multiplex, with the disused McEwan’s brewery crumbling on our left, a sprawling brownfield site on our right and the rain seeping into my shoes. Edinburgh is about as similar to Cannes as Michael Bay is to Béla Tarr. And that’s the point: Edinburgh – like our own London Film Festival – is not an industry event where the world’s major filmmakers pitch up to present films for the delectation of the privileged few. It’s a festival for the ticket-buying public, who can turn up and see films and hear filmmakers in an environment dedicated solely to cinema.

The more difficult it becomes – especially outside of London – to see a wide range of films in our cinemas all year round, the more we need events like Edinburgh. Sadly, though, there are some whose skewed logic ignores this: an ill-judged piece in last week’s Independent put the knife into the festival because, among other reasons, the writer couldn’t guarantee that he’d see Sean Penn on the street or enough of the award-winning films from Cannes. It’s true that some of the festival’s key titles will be released very soon – ‘Knocked Up’, ‘A Mighty Heart’ – but only a film festival can create the space for the people behind these films to discuss them with the public. Let’s remember, too, that Edinburgh is 400 miles from London, where we’re spoilt. Just last weekend in Edinburgh you could have bought a ticket to hear talks by Christopher Hampton, Samantha Morton, Judd Apatow and Tilda Swinton among others. Also, it’s easy to be distracted by the big-name films when many of the titles showing at Edinburgh, such as ‘Faro: Goddess of the Waters’ from Mali and ‘Solitary Fragments’ from Spain, may never see daylight again.

Still, that didn’t stop the carping as festival artistic director Hannah McGill took the reins this year following the departure of Australian Shane Danielsen, a superb programmer but a disastrous diplomat who found himself banned from at least one festival – Sundance – on the back of his sharp tongue. (Amusing, then, that McGill picked Sundance boss Geoff Gilmore to head one of her juries.) From where this critic was sitting, McGill had done a fair job of bringing variety to her festival. After the first five days of the event, I left Edinburgh with two titles still preying on my mind, both of which had arrived at Edinburgh with no hype, no distributor and no prejudice.

The first was a wonderful American film called ‘In Search of a Midnight Kiss’, which somehow managed to remind me of ‘American Pie’, ‘Before Sunset’ and ‘À Bout de Souffle’ all in one go. A late twentysomething slacker, Wilson (Scoot McNairy) is lonely on New Year’s Eve and so posts an internet message and meets bossy, damaged Vivian (Sara Simmonds). Most of the film unwraps on the streets of LA. It’s shot on black-and-white and is very funny, managing to balance the crude and the tender with rare skill.

The other stand-out film for me was Andrew Kötting’s ‘In the Wake of a Deadad’. Kötting is a filmmaker who works both for cinema and the gallery, and his new 62-minute film, a marriage of documentary with performance art, grew out of a wider project relating to his father’s death in 2000. There’s been a book, there will be an installation in London in September and this follows Kötting as he travels to places of significance to his family with inflatable models of his ‘deadad’ and his grandfather. It’s moving, intriguing, absurdly funny and prefers valid inquiry over self-indulgence. It’s exactly the sort of film for which film festivals exist.

The Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until Sunday.