Universal Cinema Film & TV Journal’s editor, Amir Ganjavie, interviewed Kate Taylor of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (The festival runs this year between August 18-23) . Their conversation touches on the film selection process and being part of a larger cultural hub.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): What makes your festival different from other festivals that are happening in the region? What is the specialty of your festival?
Kate Taylor (KT): Edinburgh International Film Festival started in 1947 initially as a documentary film festival, so it has a long history where many different moments have come to the fore.
In the 1970s, it became a key festival for a new burgeoning form of cinephilia, led by Lynda Myles, who was the festival director from 1973 to 1980, where she did things like go and find Douglas Sirk in Switzerland and put on the first retrospective of his work. Myles actively presented the overlooked and the underseen, and in collaboration with others created several key retrospectives and publications. That was also a time when the festival was working very closely with academia and ideas around criticism, and Laura Mulvey was also very involved. Edinburgh had one of the first ever presentations of women filmmakers’ work – the 1972 Women’s Event – which we celebrated as a 50th anniversary last year. That era also saw events like a conference on psychoanalysis and a focus on the avant garde running alongside the festival, and was a really vibrant time that we have been revisiting lately.*
Internationally the film festival is also known for being part of Edinburgh in August, when the city is alive with multiple festivals. There’s the Edinburgh International Festival, the Book Festival, the Art Festival, the Fringe. When you get off the train you immediately know that you’re in a city with multiple things happening. It’s a buzzing atmosphere and quite an overload. One of the unique things with EIFF as a film festival is the possibility to lean into that and to restate or reaffirm cinema in conversation with those art forms, and make a case for it.
The festival is in a very strange time at the moment. To put it in context: last year we had a strong edition, the first under a new artistic director, Kristy Matheson, and there were several changes made to the programme that we felt went well. There was a refocus on internationalism and we changed the programme structure, as well as how the programme was communicated to audiences, to enable people to find the pleasures that they might be seeking more easily and maybe take risks on films. The Festival opened with Aftersun, and closed with Koganada’s After Yang. We got great feedback from audiences and from the industry and we were like “Edinburgh is back!”
So we were about to start work on this year’s edition… but then in October, the parent charity for the festival and also for two cinemas in Scotland – the Filmhouse, which was the central art house cinema in Edinburgh, and the Belmont in Aberdeen – that charity went into administration, everything closed, and suddenly 107 people lost their jobs. They were given an hour’s notice. It was a terrible time. It was a big shock to everyone who’d been working on the festival and it was a big shock to our audiences and to filmmakers.
What followed was a huge outpouring of grief and heartbreak, and also of goodwill from people talking about what the festival and the cinemas had meant to them and experiences that they’d had in the past. We felt this dual responsibility as the custodians of the festival, to try and make sure that it would happen again and also to do everything that we could to make good on that legacy.
So Kristy, myself, and Holly Daniel, who was the festival producer, spent a few months putting together a proposal to the funder to say how we could create an edition this year. The Edinburgh International Festival stepped in and affirmed, “You can’t skip a year. If you don’t happen in 2023, it will be so difficult to come back.” And now they are hosting us for one year only, supporting us with human resources, ticketing, the website, lots of infrastructural things. Within that we’re a small team who are independently creating the programme and the delivery of the event.
Usually the festival would be around 120 films. Last year we were on 90 films, which is about right for us. This year, in our one-year-only special edition, we’re presenting 36 features. So it’s a very different shape. And of those, 24 are new features from this year. Five are retrospective titles. We’re also doing some outdoor screenings of recent films. So it’s been a wild ride. I’ve never made a festival in such a short timeline.
We got the thumbs up from the funders, Screen Scotland, in February that it should go ahead. And we needed to have a programme ready for May. Along with two fellow programmers, Rafa Sales Ross and Anna Bogutskaya, we’d already been researching at Berlin and Rotterdam and at Sundance. And then, it was full speed ahead to make something that was just very different, in terms of it had to be curated this year in a way that was really tough, to be honest.
(UM): So this year was kind of curated. But usually, are you accepting a submission or for example, are you picking films from the festival?
(KT): Both. This year we decided that we could only open up submissions to Scottish films, just in terms of the capacity as we didn’t have submissions viewers, and we didn’t have a broad array of programmers. We really wanted to see local and national talent. And the rest was research, either from attending other festivals, from meetings with sales agents and distributors, or us following and tracking projects.
I would say, in a usual year, a big part of EIFF’s identity is the retrospective. And that was one of the things that we couldn’t do this year in terms of having the time to research and build a full retrospective. Instead, we’ve been nimble, we’ve partnered with another festival that takes place in Bristol, called Cinema Rediscovered. We’re showing a couple of films from them, and a couple of other very recent restorations from the 1980s and 90s, all rebellious filmmaking voices from American independent cinema.
(UM): In terms of programming, what kind of movie are you looking for? Is there any kind of definition, or any kind of ideas about a good movie, that you are saying, “Okay, it’s a good movie for my festival, we should have it?”
(KT): A quality that I keep coming back to is liveliness, how vivid does this film feel in terms of, is it a filmmaker who’s alive today? Not necessarily making the most innovative cinema but alive to human relations, alive to what cinema can be. I think, because we had so few slots, we knew that what we couldn’t do was a big survey. We weren’t going to be able to cover as much ground geographically, or stylistically, as with a larger programme. I guess we were thinking about a slice.
Then it’s so much about a mix that we feel is going to satisfy an audience in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is an interesting place, it’s very historical, and it’s a magical place architecturally for visitors, but it’s also really hardcore in terms of what the audiences will go for. There’s a level of curiosity for art that is a pleasure to program for. We felt like it was important… because we’re in this unusual situation, it was important not to just play it safe, but rather to honour that legacy of people thinking, “Okay, Edinburgh has been a place in the past that isn’t just trying to replicate other festivals.” I mean, obviously, we’re showing lots of work from other festivals, we’ve got a few films from Berlin, a few Sundance titles, a couple of Rotterdam titles. But it’s that mix. We want to showcase UK talent as well, particularly emerging talent. Half of the new films in the festival are debut features. We’re looking to be a place for new talent to launch in the UK.
(UM): But when you are talking about the debut feature, is it mostly for UK filmmakers, or is it the world you mean?
(KT): It’s a mix. In terms of international films, we have Passages, the Ira Sachs film, we’ve got the Kelly Reichardt film Showing Up, and we’ve got the Christian Petzold film, Afire. And for us, those are probably the three most established arthouse names. Even within the international selection, there are several debuts.
Then we have a film like Ungentle, which is a UK feature from Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe. It’s not a feature, sorry, it’s a long-short. It’s 37 minutes long. And that was a film that played in a gallery in London, and we saw at another festival in England. And we felt it was one of the strongest UK films that we’d seen all year of any length, feature or short. With that one, we’re giving it its own cinema presentation, even though it’s 37 minutes, which can be quite a difficult length for festivals to accommodate.
There’s lots of queer work, and lots of works of activism. And also films that are just damn stylish, that don’t really fit into any category, but we feel are exciting from a cinematic perspective. There’s a real appetite for art house cinema that isn’t being met in the city. With the Filmhouse closed, people are not getting to see a wider variety of films. So for us, it’s key that the festival this year is joyous, that it’s its own beautiful thing, that it’s not an in-between year or a bridge, or an interim, or anything like that. I hope it’s going to be a beautiful six-day event. And it’s also important to us that we try to offer as many filmmakers with different perspectives as we can, because there’s a hunger for them, and there hasn’t been as much space in the city for them.
(UM): Do you have a kind of quota in terms of gender, race, geographical place in your festival?
(KT): No, not a quota, nothing is written down. It’s a constant conversation that we talk about within the programme team, talking about how we’re balancing, what kind of mix we have. But I think that applies across so many different intersections in terms of coming to a final selection. I’ve been working on festivals for quite a while, and you always fall in love with more films than you can select, but this year has been so tough with such a small programme.
(UM): And in terms of the population that attends, is it mostly over 50, or is it a young population coming to your festival? Because I realize that some festivals are struggling to attract the young population.
(KT): It is hard to tell because last year was the first year back full in person after COVID. And also, because the festival had been in June for quite a while, coming back to August everything was an experiment to see who was there. It was very much on a film-by-film basis. There is absolutely a hardcore to whom the festival is part of their lives, and they’ve been coming for a long time. And absolutely, that’s the way that art house cinemas tend to skew, is to an older audience, definitely in the UK.
We’re also very aware of different eras, or micro eras of cinephilia. We are starting to see a group of people who are primarily engaged with cinema through Letterboxd, and then there are people who spent lockdown getting through the top 250 films of all time and now are busting to see work in the cinema, and have built a real appetite. That’s an exciting audience for us. Audience development is something that I think about every day.
(UM): How was the relationship between stars and your festival in the past?
(KT): Plenty of stars have come. John Huston said it’s the only festival that’s worth a damn.**
I think every festival, and not just film festivals, but every kind of festival that’s an international festival, has to think a lot about the the sustainability of what we do, and make sure that if we’re inviting people, there’s a good reason. This year, especially with so few films, we are very keen to build in depth. To make sure that beyond a post-screening Q&A, there’ll be other discursive moments where the filmmakers can go a bit deeper, and audiences can engage with the films more.
For guests Edinburgh as a cultural city can be interesting too. Last year one filmmaker did his introduction, then went and saw a Fringe show, and then came back for the Q&A. That possibility of engaging with so many other cultural activities is something we definitely want to make more of, celebrating filmmakers in the context of other art forms, so they can meet other artists who are at the top of their game and engage with people making theatre, comedy, dance, and actually have those conversations. As an example, this year, the Book Festival have a writer in town, Brandon Taylor, who we’re massive fans of, so we’re partnering with them to host an event with him in conversation with Ira Sachs. I can’t wait to hear them talking.
Right now, talking to you just after we’ve announced the programme, this is a great time for a programmer. Obviously, there are a million things you should be doing, but taking the time to do the research on your guests, and to re-watch all of their films, listen to them talking on podcasts, and start reading through interviews is absolutely one of my favorite parts of working on a festival.
~
*This year’s EIFF sees the launch of The Lynda Myles Project, an essential new dialogue and film project of cinephile activism, organised by Susan Kemp, Mark Cousins, and the curatorial collective Invisible Women.
**After the interview Kate sent the following list –
Some previous visitors to the Edinburgh International Film Festival include:
Orson Welles, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Gene Kelly, Werner Herzog, Lizzie Borden, Bill Forsyth, Sam Raimi, Kathryn Bigelow, Derek Jarman, Nagisa Oshima, Gus van Sant, John Huston, Lynne Ramsey, Todd Haynes, Bela Tarr, William Friedkin, Douglas Sirk, Wim Wenders, Martin Scorsese, Tilda Swinton, Mario Van Peebles, Kevin Smith, Man Ray, Paul Schrader, D.A. Pennebaker, Danny Boyle, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, Sam Fuller, Christopher Lambert, Gael Garcia Bernal, Greta Gerwig, Darren Aronofsky, Shane Meadows, kogonada, Pawel Pawlikowski, Steven Soderbergh, John Waters and Charlotte Wells.
© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.