Movie News: Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012 – Full Programme Announced

The programme for the 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival, which will take place in late June 2012, has now been announced. The festival will screen 121 new features from 52 countries, including 19 world premières and 13 international premières. Along with older films which will be given special screenings or feature in retrospectives, the festival will be showing 150 feature films over the 12 day period.

One of the highlights of the festival this year will be the International Feature Competition, which will showcase a selection of new feature films from around the world, including both documentaries and narratives. Films competing for the award include Jang Kun Jae’s Sleepless Night, Dan Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act, and Maite Alberdi’s The Lifeguard.

British films will compete for the Michael Powell Award – among the entrants are seven films which are receiving their world premières at the festival: Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio; John Roberts’s Day of the Flowers; Katarzyna Klimkiewicz’s Flying Blind; Maja Borg’s Future of My Love; Alex Barrett’s Life Just Is; Penny Woolcock’s One Mile Away, and Luis Prieto’s Pusher. These films will also be contending with Bart Layton’s The Impostor, Shadow Dancer by James Marsh, and Small Creatures by Martin Wallace.

In the Late-night Movies strand, there will be screenings of Ian Clarke’s Guinea Pigs (world première) and John Wright’s Grabbers (European premiere), along with Eddie – The Sleepwalking Cannibal from Boris Rodriguez, Eric Wareheim and Tim Heidecker’s Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, and Magnus Martens’s Jackpot, which is based on a story by Jo Nesbo.

The festival will also showcase animation and short films, including Chris Reynaud and Kyle Balda’s 3D version of Dr Seuss’s The Lorax, and Scrubber, which is the directorial debut of the actress Romola Garai. There will also be a special screening of the new digitally restored version of Lawrence of Arabia, which will mark the 50th anniversary of the film. The restoration process will be discussed by the Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker and Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures Entertainment at the panel event Film Restoration in the Digital Age. The festival will also feature a mystery ‘surprise movie’, which could turn out to be absolutely anything, old or new, documentary or narrative.
Chris Fujiwara, artistic director of the festival, announced the details of the programme at a press conference at Filmhouse in Edinburgh on May 30th. He commented;

‘Our programme reflects the exceptionally vibrant state of current cinema. Our audiences will be able to explore a wide range of outstanding films from around the world, including work by established masters and films from new and emerging talents. There are also some no less exciting discoveries to be made this year in our Retrospectives. Altogether it’s a rich and diverse programme that tells, I believe, a fascinating story about where cinema is today, what it can learn from the past, and where it is going in the future.’

The Edinburgh International Film Festival will take place from June 20th to July 1st 2012.