EIFF 2014: The Picks

We attempt to narrow down this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival programme, which features 156 features from 47 countries, to only ten must sees – and cheat a bit

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 17 Jun 2014

Edinburgh International Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and it looks like it could be a corker. Its much-loved B-movie sidebar, Night Moves, has been given a rebrand and emerges as new strand Wicked and Wild, and it’s where you’ll find some of the festival’s biggest names. Exploitation wide boy Eli Roth rocks into Auld Reekie with cannibal horror The Green Inferno, the industrious Noel Clarke brings sci-fi thriller The Anomaly, and there’s a zombie rom-com in the form of Life After Beth, starring rising stars Dana DeHanna and Aubrey Plaza (who’ll be in Edinburgh for the screening).

In terms of star spotting, Lothian Road will be strewn with Hollywood talent. Elijah Wood is here with another interesting career choice, Dylan Thomas biopic Set Fire to the Stars; Don Johnson rolls up his sports jacket’s sleeves in Jim Mickle’s revenge flick Cold in July; and the curtain comes down on the festival on 29 June with Big Bang Theory’s über geek Simon Helberg and his debut feature, romantic comedy We’ll Never Have Paris. As well as introducing their films, Wood, Johnson and Helberg will take part in Hero Hangout, a new strand of in-person discussions hosted by Empire magazine.

But EIFF, particularly in its current form, isn’t a festival for marquee titles. It’s eleven days to go digging into cinema, and not just the contemporary kind: there’s also a wealth of rep screenings in this year’s edition. Legendary agitator John McGrath is celebrated in retrospective Border Warfare – included in the programme are filmed versions of his work with theatre companies 7:84 and Wildcat Theatre Company, including the former’s angry masterpiece The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil. With Scotland going to the polls in September, the revival couldn't be better timed. Cinephiles also have the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the work of German auteur Dominik Graf, who’ll be at the festival to put his films – practically unknown in the UK – in context.

The ten picks below are a fine place to start finding your way through the programme, but there are sure to be plenty more gems to uncover over the next few days.

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho)

Joon-ho is near-as-damn-it the most exciting filmmaker working just now, and this allegorical film set in the near future on a train that’s endlessly circumnavigating the Earth looks to be his most ambitious yet.

22&18 Jun

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)

Told in searing, textured long takes (the final one, 14 minutes long, is heartbreaking), Ming-liang's supposed swan song (it’s not, he has two other films in the programme, midium length Journey to the West and short Walking on Water, part of portmanteau Letters from the South) follows a down-at-heel family living on the streets of Taipei. Don’t expect grim social realism, though – this is cinematic poetry.

22&29 Jun

Life May Be (Mania Akbari, Mark Cousins)

Two great filmmakers – and EIFF favourites – correspond with each other through cinema. The result is an epistolary essay film meditating on art and identity. Sounds like a fascinating insight into the creative process.

21&23 Jun

Skeleton Twins (Craig Johnson)

SNL pals Bill Hader and Kirsten Wiig – aka the funniest comic actor on the planet – play siblings: I’m chuckling already. The film opens with a failed-suicide, though, so it’s not all LOLs.

21&22 Jun

Monkey Love Experiment (Ainslie Henderson and Will Anderson)

A misguided lab monkey named Ghandi dreams of flying to the moon. Made using beautifully tactile, herky-jerky stop motion, the 35-second trailer suggests these whip-smart animators might have another bittersweet gem on their hands.

Screens 22 June in EIFF McLaren Award for best Brit Animation and in the Scottish Shorts programme, 28 Jun

A Fuller Life (Samantha Fuller)

Sam Fuller is an Edinburgh Film Festival legend – he famously had a whale of a time hanging out in Auld Reekie during EIFF’s 1969 retrospective of his work – and this doc (directed by Fuller’s daughter) has great filmmakers and actors lining up to sing the Shock Corridor director’s praises. Fuller fans should also check out EIFF's rare screening of his 1972 crime caper Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (28 Jun). For another B movie legend being celebrated at the festival, check out That Guy Dick Miller.

26&27 Jun

A House in Berlin (Cynthia Beatt)

Beatt is best known for two uncategorisable films featuring a Scots woman (Tilda Swinton) exploring Berlin. She breaks her MO slightly here, with an uncategorisable film featuring a Scots woman (not Tilda Swinton) exploring a Berlin apartment.

20&22 Jun

Palo Alto (Gia Coppola)

Ever wondered why Renaissance dreamboat James Franco was taking all those creative writing courses? He was writing short story collection Palo Alto, on which this film is based. Don’t run in terror, though, because first time director Gia ‘granddaughter of Francis Ford’ Coppola shapes Franco’s cliché coming-of-age tales into a lyrical dream of a movie.

20&22 Jun

Iranian Cinema, 1962 to 1978

You’re probably all familiar with the modern masters – Kiarostami, Jafar, Makhmalbaf, Faradi, Akbari (see Life May Be, above). This sharply programmed retrospective shows us how the Iranian cinema revolution started. And you can check out the contemporary films in the Focus on Iran strand to see how far it’s come.

Runs throughout the festival

EIFF runs 18-29 Jun

http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk