Long Shot

An incestuous, half-hoax docu-farce, largely set against the background of the Edinburgh Festival, on the travails of setting up a British feature film. Scots producer Gormley hustles to package Neville Smith's commercial-sounding script about Aberdeen oilmen (called Gulf and Western), fighting to retain some semblance of meaning for the words 'independent' and 'British' in the face of temptations to grab an American director, Euro-market stars, and even the remotest whiff of Québecois finance. If you can imagine a picaresque comedy being forged from the repeated lament for a native cinema, this is it - and its hard-knocks humour probably succeeds in carrying it beyond an in-joke.