What to watch at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2023

Festivals are in a constant state of metamorphosis, and this year’s edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (18 to 23 August 2023) is testament to that. The inaugural edition under programming director Kate Taylor sees EIFF in a radically different shape this year. Hosted by the Edinburgh International Festival, the event will span six days in cinemas, presenting a compact and curated selection plus a weekend of outdoor screenings labelled Cinema Under the Stars.  

The festival will once again spotlight Scottish talent with its opening night by hosting the world premiere of Johnny Barrington’s directorial debut Silent Roar, a love letter to the landscape of the Isle of Lewis and a vibrant mesh of coming-of-age, surfer movie and irreverent comedy. Bookending the festival is Fremont, which marks the return of British-Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali to Edinburgh, 13 years after his debut Frontier Blues played at the festival in 2010.  

Elsewhere, Celine Song gives a thoughtful portrait of diasporic yearning with Sundance breakout Past Lives; German auteur Christian Petzold reunites with muse Paula Beer to explore the struggles of self-involved creatives in Afire; and American director Ira Sachs jets off to Paris to find the ugliest traits of gorgeous people with the sizzling Passages. 

For this year’s retrospective selection, EIFF highlights rebellious voices in American independent cinema with restorations of Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983), Wayne Wang’s Life Is Cheap… but Toilet Paper Is Expensive (1989), Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso (1998) and Fran Rubel Kuzui’s Tokyo Pop (1988). British film Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) gets a homecoming, as director Shane Meadows brings his film back to Edinburgh for a special screening nearly two decades after its world premiere in the Scottish capital. 

To help you navigate this year’s selection, the EIFF programming team has handpicked a few titles to get you started, from Kelly Reichardt’s newest collaboration with Michelle Williams, Showing Up, to Laura Citarella’s beguiling Argentinian epic Trenque Lauquen. And, for those who enjoyed the appetiser, the main is readily available on the festival’s full programme.

The looming threat at the heart of Paris Zarcilla’s sharp feature debut is a shapeshifter. At times, it takes the form of a decaying old man whose kindness masks vile intentions (a terrifying David Hayman); at others, it manifests as a soul-breaking structural power imbalance. The heroine, however, is clear: Joy (Max Eigenmann), a Filipina single mother working several housekeeping jobs to save up for a visa for her and her savvy daughter Grace (newcomer Jaeden Paige Boadilla). Moved by his own experiences of diaspora and displacement, the British-born Filipino filmmaker weaves an urgent commentary on UK politics through a fresh, searingly effective thriller, which recently picked up the SXSW narrative grand jury award. 

– Rafa Sales Ross

With Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt gathers two of her favourite things: Oregon and Michelle Williams. In their fourth collaboration, Reichardt’s muse plays Lizzy, a perpetually pouty sculptor whose creative process seems unable to escape life’s many naggings. Her neighbour-slash-landlord (the always terrific Hong Chau) finds time to nurture a wounded bird but not to fix Lizzy’s broken water heater. She is a more successful artist than Lizzy, too – the cruellest of insults. While chronicling the lead up to Lizzy’s latest exhibition, Reichardt practices an exercise in self-reflection that culminates in a rivetingly insightful observation on the lives – and communities – of struggling creatives. 

– Rafa Sales Ross

Still reeling from the recent loss of their mother, a trio of brothers goes out hunting within thick, sprawling Scottish woods. They return home not fuller, but lighter, having gotten rid of the overbearing burden which defined much of their young lives. Alas, relief proves as fleeting as revenge, the hunting excursion triggering the sinuous house of mirrors that fuels Rodger Griffiths’ gritty feature debut. Kill cleverly toys with genre tropes to build a skin-tingling observation on toxic masculinity, rage and grief featuring a new generation of Scottish talent, including Game of Thrones alum Daniel Portman. 

– Rafa Sales Ross

It’s near impossible to not fall in love with filmmaker Ella Glendinning in her debut documentary Is There Anybody out There? Born with a disability so rare she has never seen or met another person who shares her experience, Glendinning turns the camera on herself but skilfully looks beyond her own experience and into the ableist structures that surround us. Glendinning travels around the world meeting other disabled folks as well as the doctors who purport to ‘fix’ them, producing a highly entertaining manifesto that urges us to look at disability not as something to be fixed. 

– Anna Bogutskaya

In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, her eponymous character shifts genders halfway through the story. In his debut film, author and philosopher Paul B. Preciado blends documentary, biography and literary adaptation into the rousing experimental marvel that is Orlando, My Political Biography. Preciado films the casting process for a new adaptation of Orlando, auditioning trans and non-binary performers, aged 8 to 70. Blending reading from Woolf’s book with their own lived experience, the film explores gender identity as political and social issues, but also as a source of poetry and love. Orlando: My Political Biography is the smartest crowd-pleaser of this year’s festival. 

– Anna Bogutskaya

Co-writers and co-directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping adapt their own, award-winning short film of the same name into a tense queer revenge thriller. Starring Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as a drag performer who, after a traumatic assault, becomes consumed with plotting revenge on the closeted thug (played with tight-jawed intensity by George MacKay) who led the charge. Femme is a film exploring the uncomfortable, often unspoken grey areas between desire and disgust, self-hate and self-empowerment. 

– Anna Bogutskaya

Artist, writer and podcaster Huw Lemmey (Bad Gays) collaborates with artist filmmaker Onyeka Igwe (No Archive Can Restore You) to explore intertwining histories of British espionage and male homosexuality in this mid-length film narrated by Ben Whishaw. The film packs a dizzying amount of wit, insight and poignancy into its 37 minutes, and as one of the finest UK films we’ve seen this year of any length, we are glad to play it in a solo cinema presentation.

– Kate Taylor

Tough questions of land development and indigenous rights fuel this tense thriller featuring a woman hellbent on revenge. Following a violent incident, Dasru (Manoj Bajpayee) and his wife have left rural Jharkhand to struggle in the big city. But when they are recognised by someone from their past, Dasru must go on the run with their three-month-old baby. Director Devashish Makhija (Ajji, Bhonsle) delivers intense genre filmmaking with heart-stopping moments of peril, while bringing piercing intelligence and empathy to the globally resonant struggles of indigenous people displaced. 

– Kate Taylor

This 1988 film was a complete discovery for us. We found it in the dictionary under irresistible. New York punk Wendy (Carrie Hamilton) travels to Tokyo on a whim and finds inspiration, romance and pop stardom with Hiro (Diamond Yukai), a similarly frustrated musician trying to break through. Directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, who later went on to make the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, Tokyo Pop is an infectiously charming timepiece right down to the Keith Haring designed opening credits. 

– Kate Taylor

From Argentinian auteur Laura Citarella, what begins as a mystery soon deepens into an odyssey of literary romance, queer kinship, meditations on landscape, and creature-feature sci-fi, via many shaggy-dog diversions. Across 12 chapters, over two feature-length parts director Citarella, of the El Pampero Cine collective (La flor, Dog Lady, Historias extraordinarias), creates a deeply absorbing cinema of enigmas. 

– Kate Taylor