Edinburgh Film Festival reveals its 2026 programme

This year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, which returns 13-19 August, will be the 79th edition of the long-running event. Yet in many ways, EIFF still feels like a spring chicken, having recently been reimagined by a new team headed up by director Paul Ridd and producer Emma Boa. Heading into his third edition in charge, Ridd believes that the festival "feels like it’s hitting a stride we have been working towards since the start of 2024". In introducing this year's programme, Ridd says: "With stellar Competitions, fantastically varied and essential new films from Scotland, from the wider UK and from the rest of the world, and more World Premieres than we have ever screened before, this year’s line-up offers a panoramic vision of cinema at its most exciting, dynamic and full of potential.”

There are 21 feature films getting their world premieres from the 38-strong lineup, along with 30-plus short films receiving their world premieres. This year’s programme is showcasing a wide array of themes, styles and genres from all over the world, with titles coming from Ireland, the US, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Lithuania, Japan, Canada and Portugal. Scotland also features prominently, with the festival opening and closing with homegrown work.

Gala Screenings

The festival kicks off with The Incomer, the debut from Edinburgh-born filmmaker Louis Paxton. We’re told it blends surreal comedy with brooding tension and dramatic, windswept landscapes as it tells the story of two siblings (Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke) living alone on a Scottish island, whose isolation is interrupted when a stranger from the mainland (Domhnall Gleeson) arrives at their door. For the third year in a row, the festival will close with a Scottish documentary. In this case, it's the sure-to-be-moving Bel, Louise Lockwood’s portrait of the late, great Scottish-Kenyan musician Beldina Odenyo aka Heir of the Cursed.

In Conversation: Ewan McGregor, Kenneth Branagh & more

One of the most welcome moves by this new EIFF team has been the reintroduction of the festival’s storied In Conversation strand, where great filmmakers and actors dig into their creative work on stage. Legendary actor Bruce Dern will discuss his long and varied career, and the festival will be screening his 1978 classic Coming Home, along with his brand new film Northbound. Ewan McGregor will talk through his wide-ranging work and will take part in a special screening of the film that helped launch him as a global star, Trainspotting, which turns 30 this year. Actor and director Kenneth Branagh will also be in town to become the first recipient of EIFF's Outstanding Contribution to Cinema Award. Legendary American indie producer Christine Vachon will discuss her career, which includes a fruitful four-decade collaboration with Todd Haynes, and the great documentarian Ken Burns will talk about his practice.

Festival hits from Gregg Araki, Nicolas Winding Refn and more

Her Private Hell courtesy of EIFF

The Out of Competition strand offers a snapshot of what’s going on right now in world cinema, including films that made a splash earlier in the year at festivals like Sundance and Cannes. We’re looking forward to I Want Your Sex, the latest film from New Queer Cinema pioneer Gregg Araki; it’s said to be a horny comedy centred on the dom-sub relationship that forms between a guileless young man (Cooper Hoffman) and his kink-positive older boss (Olivia Wilde). Also much-anticipated is Lance Hammer’s moral thriller Queen at Sea starring Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay, which won two Silver Bears (the Jury Prize and Best Performance) at this year’s Berlinale.

Less well-received at its world premiere in Cannes was Sheep in the Box, the new film from Hirokazu Kore-eda, but it wouldn’t be the first time this great Japanese filmmaker was misunderstood by critics; Edinburgh audiences will get a chance to decide for themselves when Kore-eda’s film has its UK premiere. EIFF also has the return of the Danish enfant terrible Nicolas Winding Refn. His first film since The Neon Demon, Her Private Hell is a neon-soaked, giallo-inspired horror-thriller that has all the excess violence and style that we’ve come to expect from Refn. Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton and Scotland’s Dougray Scott are among the cast.

Elsewhere in the Out of Competition programme is The Best Summer, a music doc dripping in mid-90s nostalgia from director Tamra Davis; it features performances and candid interviews with the likes of The Foo Fighters, Bikini Kill, Pavement and Beastie Boys. Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon is, as the title suggests, a portrait of the Turner-winning Scottish visual artist. The Peril at Pincer Point from Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine looks like a properly surreal oddity. We’ve seen this British debut described as 'Eraserhead meets The Wicker Man meets Pirates of the Caribbean'. And another British debut, Extra Geography from Molly Manners, should also be on your radar. It’s a spiky coming-of-age comedy drama that traces the highs and lows of an intense friendship between two adolescent girls at an English boarding school.

World Premieres and the Sean Connery Prize

Snapshot, courtesy of EIFF

There's also a smattering of world premieres playing out of competition, including 70s-set Scottish road movie Borges and Me from Marc Turtletaub, whose film Puzzle opened EIFF in 2018, and the lean, dry-humoured thriller Empty Heaven from Abdolreza Kahani, who won EIFF’s top prize, The Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, last year with Mortician.

Speaking of world premieres and the Sean Connery prize, ten box-fresh films will be competing for that title this year and its generous £50,000 prize fund, which is decided EIFF’s audiences. A title that immediately jumps out at us is Mission, the long-anticipated new film from Scottish director Paul Wright, which will be the first Scottish film to compete for the prize. Wright has teamed up once again with George MacKay, who was a revelation in Wright's 2013 debut, For Those in Peril. Here MacKay stars as a solitary man who embarks on a mission of self-discovery through extreme pursuits. Wright explains that the film “taps into a feeling and energy present within many of us and pushes this to extremes in an emotive, sensory way.” And on working again with MacKay, he said: “Reuniting with George is a gift for the project, knowing his talent and commitment to the role, as well as how well we work together.”

Elsewhere in the competition is the formally inventive Snapshot, which has been shot entirely in a 1:1 circle aspect ratio to mimic the style of a pinhole camera. Set in Victorian London, it follows a group of women ghost hunters who believe a recent spree of murders attributed to Jack the Ripper were actually committed by a malevolent spirit. Other British entries are The State of Us, Ollie Gardner and Jake Harvey’s tragicomedy about a boisterous tearaway who breaks his best friend out of hospice care for one final night of fun around Yorkshire; Out There, Simon Rynink’s 1999-set comedy about a gang of misfits who uncover a UFO conspiracy in a sleepy Welsh town; and Skintown, a drama about two best pals longing to escape 90s Northern Ireland.

Two films from the US make the cut: Lindsay Ryan’s comedy Capsized, about a family holiday aboard a houseboat that goes awry, and Tyler-Marie Evans’s bruising road movie Pretty Babies, about two teenage girls who run away to Hollywood chasing dreams of stardom but find a much darker reality. Canadian cinema is represented by Bart Simpson’s The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman, a documentary about the eponymous creator of MAD Magazine. From Italy comes Sacred Creatures, a blackly comic thriller from director Frieda Luk about three estranged siblings who reunite on a rural retreat in Italy after the middle sister’s release from psychiatric treatment. And there’s also the Dutch film First Zone, Thom Lunshof’s thriller about a woman who embarks on an odyssey across a flooded and desolate post-apocalyptic landscape.

Retrospectives, Midnight Madness, Shorts

Sexy Beast, courtesy of EIFF

There are also plenty of Retrospective screenings coming up. To coincide with Kenneth Branagh’s screen talk, there’s a 30th anniversary screening of his epic Hamlet. There’s always some Sean Connery in the retrospective mix at EIFF and this year it’s Michael Bay's action-packed The Rock; Connery’s son Jason will introduce. Takashi Miike’s taboo-shattering black comedy Visitor Q also gets a revival. Martin Scorsese’s sprawling 1995 essay film A Personal Journey Through American Movies screens in its entirety – the full 3 hours and 45 minutes – with an intro from producer Bob Last. And we’re particularly excited for the 25-year anniversary screening of Jonathan Glazer’s debut feature – the brilliant, menacing, Pinter-esque crime drama Sexy Beast, which The Skinny will be helping present.

Genre fans are well-served with Midnight Madness, which will open with Chee Keong Cheung’s no-holds-barred POV thriller Bad Day at the Office and closes with Daniel Goldhaber’s inventive new take on cult 70s horror Faces of Death. Also in Midnight Madness is the world premiere of the seventh instalment in the action franchise Rise of the Footsoldier, titled Rise of the Footsoldier: Retribution – come see if Craig Fairbrass is still kicking ass. There are also several short film programmes across the festival: The Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for Short Filmmaking Excellence competition; an Out of Competition shorts programme; an Animation Shorts programme; an experimental shorts programme; and showcases from Bridging the Gap, NFTS Sean Connery Talent Lab, and Screen Academy Scotland.

And what's mentioned above is only some of what’s on offer at EIFF this August. For the full lineup, head to https://www.edfilmfest.org/