10 films to watch at the Edinburgh International Film Festival

Following the collapse of umbrella organisation the Centre for the Moving Image in 2022, the Edinburgh Film Festival ran a smaller iteration in 2023, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Now, a new company – featuring producer Andrew Macdonald (Trainspotting, Civil War) as chairperson – has been established to run the festival as its own separate entity once more, with Paul Ridd recruited as director for this new incarnation. 

Operating at various venues across the city (former festival hub Filmhouse is still set to reopen down the line), the EIFF reboot takes place 15 to 21 August. While the number of days and overall programme size are shorter and smaller than the last ‘normal’ edition of the festival before the pandemic (when it was still in June), there is a palpable sense of excitement brewing for this new version of one of the world’s longest-running film festivals. 

Opening the festival will be the UK premiere of The Outrun, director Nora Fingscheidt’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s best-selling memoir, starring Saoirse Ronan, while a new focus on world premieres – although UK or European premieres are still in abundance – extends to the closing night centrepiece film, the documentary Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands, directed by Blair Young and Carla J. Easton.

There’s also a new Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, a £50,000 prize for one of 10 feature-length world premieres running in-competition. Both this and The Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for Short Filmmaking Excellence are decided by audience vote.

Here are 10 further festival highlights to keep on your radar, even if you’re not in the city this month. More details on these and all the other films playing at Edinburgh can be found in the festival’s full programme.

Executive produced by Hou Hsiao-hsien and co-starring regular Tsai Ming-liang collaborator Lu Yi-ching, director Chiang Wei Liang’s first feature taps into the ideas of feeling invisible or ineffectual in our day-to-day survival. Rooted in rural Taiwan and the Southeast Asian diaspora that make their way there, Mongrel follows Thai migrant Oom (Wanlop Rungkumjad), one of several undocumented workers operating out of a camp in the Taiwanese mountains. Oom has no formal training in caregiving but proves helpful for local elderly and disabled people, and proves himself a useful asset for the shady boss who runs the camp.

Forget Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finally making it through decades of development hell, this year’s unlikeliest sequel comes in the form of director Ben Rivers’ Bogancloch, which revisits the subject of his 2011 film Two Years at Sea. The documentary follows wilderness-dwelling recluse Jake Williams, portraying his life throughout the seasons in a Scottish highland forest.

One of the more hyped elements of the new EIFF is the Midnight Madness strand, focusing on genre filmmaking for cinema goers who don’t mind getting home very late. Opening the strand will be the UK premiere for Alien: Romulus, just before its wide release, while Midnight Madness will close with the UK premiere of Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror The Substance, which won the screenplay prize in competition at Cannes. Demi Moore stars as a Hollywood star facing the ageism and sexism of the industry, who undergoes an experimental procedure to produce a temporary younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. Like most films in this strand, The Substance is certainly not for the squeamish.

Speaking of which… Gaspar Noé! The provocateur is one of a few filmmakers participating in lengthy talk events during the festival (Thelma Schoonmaker and Alex Garland are among the others). He’ll also be providing a (no doubt memorable) introduction for a screening of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. 

From The Worst Person in the World to the worst scenario in the world. Winner of the Caméra d’Or prize for best first feature at Cannes, tense chamber drama Armand (directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel) sees Renate Reinsve’s character called into her six-year-old son’s school after he is accused of crossing boundaries with one of his classmates.

When tragedy strikes, an unexpected bond forms between two migrants in the Chinese community of Flushing, Queens, one of whom is played by Lee Kang-sheng, the great muse of director Tsai Ming-liang. Writer-director Constance Tsang’s debut feature was considered a highlight of the Critics’ Week section at Cannes.

A Kazakhstani genre highlight lurking outside of the Midnight Madness strand, Steppenwolf promises an explosive, female-led riff on road trip movies, detective thrillers, westerns and samurai films, all stuffed into the blender for a potent mix.

Playing in competition for the Sean Connery Prize, Lollipop is one of several British features receiving its world premiere at this year’s festival. Writer-director Daisy-May Hudson’s film explores individuals on the margins of society bonding in the face of considerable hardship, with the starting point being the release of a young mother (Posy Sterling) from prison, desperate to maintain custody of her two children.

The prolific Mark Cousins’ latest documentary, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things won the Crystal Globe (Best Film) prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this summer. Twenty years after her death, Cousins looks at the life and work of Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, with a focus on a pivotal 1949 experience atop Switzerland’s Grindelwald glacier that rewired her artistic perspective.

One of the world premieres playing out of competition is this promising Argentinian drama about two women forced to face hard truths about their friendship during a wild, drunken night. The film will have a special introduction by producer, screenwriter and former EIFF Director Lynda Myles, whose programming in decades past helped shape the legacy of British film festivals at large.