This year, the Edinburgh International Film Festival will debut 21 feature films, 10 of which will screen as part of the festival’s official competition strand, which is set to run from August 13 to 19. 

Titles competing for the festival’s Sean Connery Prize include Mission, the latest feature from Scottish filmmaker Paul Wright (For Those In Peril), starring George MacKay and Rosy McEwen (Blue Jean). The film has been described as the “punk exploration” of an alienated young man who throws off the shackles of his solitary life in an attempt to experience the highs and lows of existence at its most extreme.

Also screening in competition is The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman, a documentary feature about the American cartoonist and editor Harvey Kurtzman. The film includes contributions from Terry Gilliam, the late Stan Lee and Robert Crumb. And Little Miss Sunshine producer Marc Turtletaub returns to feature filmmaking with Borges and Me, his first feature as a director since 2023’s Jules. The film is an adaptation of Jay Parini’s bestselling memoir.  

This year’s edition also marks Festival Director Paul Ridd’s third at the helm. Ridd joined Edinburgh from Picturehouse in 2023, where he last served as head of acquisitions. 

“In these two past editions, we’ve created a festival with the competition strands at its core. They really have an identity now,” Ridd tells Deadline, adding that this year the festival has a record number of world premiere titles. The increase, he explains, best illustrates how Edinburgh has carved out a position for itself on the busy festival calendar. 

“We’re a legitimate launchpad for new and emerging filmmakers as well as established voices,” Ridd explains. “We have 10 films in competition each year, and last year seven of those 10 films went on to get distribution in the UK, U.S., or both.”

One of those titles was Elliot Tuttle’s much-talked-about feature Blue Film, which debuted at last year’s festival before landing in UK cinemas via Peccadillo Pictures and the U.S. with Obscured Releasing. The film follows a fetish camboy (Kieron Moore) who accepts a private house call, only to discover his masked client is his former middle-school teacher and a convicted sex offender.

Blue Film landed positive notices from critics out of Edinburgh and upon its theatrical release. Deadline’s critic Damon Wise described the film as a “very deftly played two-hander.” But shortly after the Edinburgh screening, Tuttle revealed the film had been turned down by every major festival it had been submitted to because of its subject matter. So why did Ridd and Edinburgh take a chance on the feature?

“It was just a film that embodied in many ways the things we value and think are important,” Ridd says. “It was made on a micro budget outside of traditional systems. It was made on a controversial subject and was beautifully acted. We saw it in those terms when we watched it.” 

The Incomer, the debut feature from Edinburgh-born filmmaker Louis Paxton, will open this year’s festival. Set on a remote Scottish island and starring Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina), the film follows siblings Isla (Rankin) and Sandy (O’Rourke), who have lived in peaceful isolation for decades, hunting seabirds, chatting to mythic creatures, and defending their isle from dreaded Incomers. The official synopsis reads: “Their world is upended with the arrival of Daniel (Gleeson), an awkward council worker, tasked with uprooting them to the mainland.” Louise Lockwood’s debut documentary feature Bel will close the festival. The film tells the story of Beldina Odenyo, the Kenyan-Scottish musician who performed under the stage name Heir of the Cursed. 

After Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands, a documentary feature on Scottish girl bands from the 1960s to the present in 2024, and Paul Sng’s Irvine Welsh doc Reality Is Not Enough, in 2025, Bel will be the third documentary on Scottish artistry to close Edinburgh in as many years. Ridd says the trend is “completely unintentional.” 

“We’re always looking for something to close the festival with the right spirit behind it, and it’s always a very difficult process,” he says. “It’s just very nice that in the last three years we’ve done three films which, in different ways, talk about artistic integrity and creation in ways that feel kind of interesting and innovative.”

With a smile, he adds: “But that is not to say that next year we’re absolutely guaranteeing that we’re going to close with a film about a Scottish artist.”

Elsewhere, Iranian filmmaker Abdolreza Kahani returns to Edinburgh with his latest feature Empty Heaven. The filmmaker was in competition last year with Mortician, which won the Sean Connery Prize. He used the £50,000 cash prize to fund Empty Heaven. In the Out of Competition strand, films screening include Carlos Conceição’s Bodyhackers, Molly Manners’ Extra Geography, Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest Her Private Hell, and Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. 

This year, Edinburgh also launches its honorary Outstanding Contribution to Cinema Award, which will be handed to actor and director Kenneth Branagh. The festival’s midnight madness strand continues with Chee Keong Cheung’s Bad Day at the Office, starring John Hannah, opening and Daniel Goldhaber’s latest feature, Faces Of Death, starring Barbie Ferreira (Euphoria) and Charli xcx, closing the strand. The EIFF lineup also features seven retrospective screenings, including a 30th-anniversary celebration of Trainspotting at Leith Theatre, with live cast and crew commentary, followed by DJ sets by Irvine Welsh and Darren Emerson.

“This is the first time something like this has been done on this scale, certainly in terms of the number of people who will be in the room watching it,” Ridd says of the live commentary event. 

“It’s really designed to emulate the format that was so popular with DVD commentaries, providing an opportunity for cast and crew to reflect on memories of making the film, or to just banter with one another.”

Edinburgh has yet to confirm which members of the film’s cast and crew will participate in the live commentary session; however, the film’s lead Ewan McGregor is confirmed for one of the festival’s industry in conversation sessions, so it is safe to speculate he will be present at the Leith Theatre. When asked whether director Danny Boyle might be present, Ridd smiles and deflects: “We’ve got some great people lined up,” he says.

“I think it’s going to be beautiful.”

Iceland-born, U.S.-based producer Sigurjón “Joni” Sighvatsson has the kind of résumé that speaks for itself: David Lynch‘s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Wild at Heart, Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Weight of Water, plus music videos and series including Twin Peaks and Beverly Hills, 90210.

This week, the Palomar Pictures principal — who co-founded Propaganda Films in 1986 — returns to the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival to receive the Raimondo Rezzonico Award in the Piazza Grande on Thursday evening. The honor is named for the man who served as Locarno’s president from 1981 to 1999.

Ahead of his trip to Switzerland, Sighvatsson spoke with THR about his excitement over returning to Locarno, his read on the festival circuit at large, and why he believes his work doesn’t belong in the “closed system” he says Netflix has built.

Sighvatsson has visited Locarno before and remains a fan, largely thanks to its more adventurous, less predictable curation. “The festival is not just focused on what is in the competition,” he says. “Everything has changed. When Wild at Heart won in Cannes [in 1990], that was a big platform for that kind of unusual film to get. Now, we don’t know really what Cannes is anymore. What are they catering to? What is their vision? It is a very different festival from Locarno.”

Unlike the bigger festivals, he adds, Locarno “never had this incredible focus on just getting stars, or just a competition, or just this.” That flexibility, he argues, will serve it well: “I love Locarno. I think some of the other festivals have become prisoners of their own success, and with the business changing, they have changed. I think festivals like Locarno, which are smaller and have a slightly lower profile and different approaches to film, will do better.”

AI’s Impact On the Industry

With AI a hot topic of debate in Hollywood and beyond, what is the producer’s reading on the technology’s likely impact on the film industry? “I think AI actually will help in many ways, but I don’t really see AI movies changing things because in the end, movies are about people and they’re about stories,” Sighvatsson tells THR. “I see it working for some projects. For the new The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan was not using AI for a reason — because he doesn’t want to make people feel it’s AI. I heard the new [live-action] Moana, the Disney film, feels just like an AI film, even though it’s using real characters [and CGI].”

His bottom line: “I think it’s a double-edged sword, but AI will help. It’s like any very powerful tool, for example, the atom bomb. It’s all about how you use it, or if you use it at all. And I think a lot of filmmakers will opt not to use AI because they don’t need to. But others will use it. Will it change the course of cinema? No. I think it will change television more.”

On Netflix and the “Closed System”

Sighvatsson isn’t optimistic about television’s current state, largely because of streaming — and he draws a sharp line between films and what Netflix produces. “There are things that Netflix calls films. I don’t call them films,” he says. “I call them Netflix films. That’s very different than a film.”

He elaborates: “Most of the things that Netflix does don’t have a very deep meaning, and they are not supposed to. You still need a lot of skill to make those big Netflix films, but they don’t really expect them to have a long life, and they are shown only within a closed system. It’s the Netflix system, so Netflix is just making something for a closed system, whereas everything that I’ve made, even music videos, is for an open system that anybody can access.”

The distinction, he says, comes down to distribution: “The difference is that Netflix doesn’t even sell any of its product to anybody else but Netflix. So they’ve created the language that fits this box that is called the Netflix box, and they’re very successful, including with some of the animation and some of the children’s content. And even though Netflix is changing, it doesn’t change the fact that a Netflix film fits only in a Netflix box. It wouldn’t fit in an Imax theater, for example. … And when you’re producing for such masses, you automatically demand less complexity.”

Given all that, don’t expect a Sighvatsson-produced Netflix title anytime soon. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I don’t think it’s my thing. I don’t think I’m in the Netflix universe.”

Still, he gives the streamer credit where it’s due. “I think it’s great that other people [create content for] it. That’s fantastic, and Netflix has changed the business,” he says. “What I think Netflix has done well is give people in other countries an opportunity to make material in different languages, in different cultures. That, I think, is the greatest contribution Netflix has made.”