Search: Edinburgh International Film Festival, Afternoon - Edinburgh Festival Guide

An elegiac recreation of life in a small town
in Georgia in the late Soviet period, as seen
from the point of view of a young boy: a
world of traditional weddings and funerals,
folkloric spells and medicines, and the magic
of dreams. Director Georgy Paradzhanov,
nephew of the great filmmaker Sergei
Paradzhanov, establishes his own universe of
beauty and wonder in this outstanding debut
feature fiction film.

Set against the background of Michael
Jackson’s visit to Romania in 1992, the film
tells the story of a small town confronting the
realities of post-Communist life. Threatened
with the closure of the local factory, the men
who work there decide to buy it themselves.
How to raise the money? By selling their
sperm to a fertility clinic. A hilarious social
satire filled with rueful insight into a recent
historical transition.

Armed with his 16mm camera, Wiesinger
travelled to the sister cities of his German
hometown Freiburg, collecting images from
France, Spain, England, Austria, Iran, Ukraine,
USA, Japan, Italy and the Black Forest.
These fragments are brought together to
form an associative whole, where aesthetic
similarities and differences – building fronts,
road junctions, textures and surfaces, the
familiar and the strange – unfold to an original
musical composition by Cornelius Schwehr.

Ava, a poet, is dissatisfied in her marriage
with a well-to-do bourgeois man and finds
solace in her friendship with their maid. When
the maid disappears, Ava’s relationship with
her husband reaches a crisis. The filming of
Mania Akbari’s crisp and poetic exploration
of women’s roles in her native Iran was
interrupted when the arrest of several Iranian
filmmakers prompted Akbari to leave for the
UK, where she finished the film.
Screening with: Dancing Mania
Roya Akbari/Iran, Canada/2012/25 min

Four young actors from Tehran create a
theatre piece that they plan to tour around
Iran in a colourful truck, entertaining children
in remote areas of the country. But, before
they leave, their play has to be approved by
the State, and tempers flare within the group
when meaningful scenes must be cut for the
show to go on. An illuminating and thought-provoking
road movie.

Escaping his foundering marriage in London,
Gerry (Aidan Gillen) goes to Singapore to
sort out the estate of his brother John, who
owned a hostess bar there and has just died in
mysterious circumstances. Increasingly drawn
toward John’s Chinese widow, while learning
more and more about the ins and outs of
John’s business, Gerry realises he has the
opportunity to start a new life by slipping into
his brother’s identity. An atmospheric, alluring
and incisive character study.

A spine-tingling masterpiece based on
the true story of London serial killer John
Christie (Richard Attenborough) and his
hapless boarders, Timothy and Beryl Evans
(John Hurt, Judy Geeson). Fleischer’s
scrupulous sense of detail generates
overwhelming suspense, and Attenborough
and Hurt deliver brilliant performances in
one of the all-time great chillers.

A top Russian scientist is critically wounded
after defecting to the West. The only hope
of saving him lies in miniaturising a surgical
team and injecting them into his bloodstream
to operate on his blood clot. A classic of 60s
pop cinema.

The story of how Susumu Shingu moves from
sculpture to architecture, and why he wants
to do it, brings us into privileged contact with
a passionate environmental story, a moving
exploration of creativity, and a remarkably
sweet and engaging human being. The artist’s
lifelong “dialogue with the wind and with water” is evoked through beautiful, lustrous imagery and the wisdom of a man who has lived a long life with his eyes wide open.

During the Klondike Gold Rush, a small
group of German immigrants travel towards
the far north, hoping to strike it rich in the
goldfields of Dawson City. They’ve been
misled by their overly optimistic guide and
are unprepared for the dangers and rigours of
the journey. Beset by uncertainty, exhaustion,
and conflicts, the travellers plunge deeper
and deeper into the wilderness... A stark and
minimalist Western by one of Germany’s best
new filmmakers.