HippFest returns for its 15th edition

Scotland's silent film festival – HippFest – is back with another crackerjack lineup of classics and recently uncovered gems that will be accompanied by some brilliantly talented musicians

Article by Jamie Dunn | 04 Feb 2025
  • Friday Night Gala, HippFest 2024

Scotland is not short of film festivals but there are none quite like HippFest. Scotland’s annual celebration of silent cinema returns to the Hippodrome in Bo'ness this spring for its 15th edition (19-23 Mar), with a globe-trotting lineup of silent-era cinema – paired, as ever, with wonderful live music. Expect rollicking sports films, seedy melodramas, poetic realism, physical comedy, heart-in-mouth stunt work, pioneering folk horror, Britain’s most handsome screen actor, gentleman thieves, cannibalistic spider women and, of course, Laurel & Hardy.

The festival’s opening night screening is With Reindeer and Sled in Inka Länta's Winterland, a beautiful, naturalistic film about the indigenous people of Sweden: the Sami. Blending documentary and fictional elements, this 1926 film is an intimate portrait of this region and people’s way of life, detailing domestic rituals and featuring dramatic hunting scenes. From the clip that was screened at HippFest’s press launch, I can also promise jaw-dropping cinematography capturing the drama of the landscape in northern Sweden. 

The Friday Night Gala (dress code: Tartan or HippFest Glamour) takes us to Scotland via the lens of Hollywood with Maurice Tourneur’s The Pride of the Clan. The 1917 film stars “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford as Marget MacTavish, a plucky Scottish lass who is forced to take over as the head of the MacTavish clan after her father drowns at sea. The trailer suggests a blend of Highland romanticism, feisty humour and some sea-fairing drama to rival Titanic. 

Black and white film still showing two men hiding behind a tree.
Still from Forgotten Faces

The curtain comes down on HippFest with Victor Schertzinger’s little-seen Forgotten Faces (1928), which looks like one of this year’s must-attend screenings. It’s reportedly a blisteringly-paced and stylishly shot crime caper filled with twists and turns as it follows the fate of a suave gentleman thief named “Heliotrope” Harry and his fraught relationship with his treacherous wife. Full of bravura setpieces, including a tour de force final act, it should bring the festival to a close in high style. 

There a plenty of gems to seek out in between. There’s a spotlight on Alma Reville, the screenwriter and film editor who had a long and fruitful collaboration with her husband Alfred Hitchcock. The festival presents an online lecture on Reville's career by Dr Josephine Botting and a chance to see Hitchcock’s early melodrama The Pleasure Garden, the 1925 film on which Hitchcock and Reville met, fell in love and began collaborating. There's also a screening of The Constant Nymph, the 1928 romantic drama starring Ivor Novello that Reville wrote a few years later while pregnant with her daughter.  

Black and white film still showing a woman standing behind a large spiderweb.
Still from The Cave of the Spider Woman | Image courtesy of The National Library of Norway

I love the look of The Cave of the Spider Woman, a wild 1927 fantasy from China filled with lavish costumes, imaginative sets and some impressive early special effects bringing to life the eponymous shape-shifting creature. There are more genre thrills in the atmospheric Finnish film Before the Face of the Sea (1926), a proto folk-horror about a fisherman drawn to a young woman from a family filled with dark secrets, and the German romp The Chase after Millions (1930), about two stowaways who attempt to unravel a malevolent plot onboard a steam train. 

Most of the films screening at HippFest are around a century old but there’s also a mint-fresh work: What the Water Remembers –The Dark Mirror, a joint commission by HippFest and Birmingham’s Flatpack Festival. Directed by Moira Salt, the collage film has been assembled from footage from five different archives (including the moving-image archive from Falkirk) to weave a mythological tale inspired by the rich recorded history and transnational cultural significance of canals. Scottish folktronic duo Tommy Perman and Andrew Wasylyk have created a new ambient soundscape for the film.

There’s plenty more to find in the programme like John Ford’s racetrack drama The Shamrock Handicap (1926); Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality (1923), the slapstick genius’s preposterous take on Romeo and Juliet; Soviet film I Want to be a Train Driver (1935), which is the festival’s annual Platform Reel screening on Bo’ness’s old railway platform; and the French masterpiece The Swallow and the Titmouse (1920). And, as usual, there will be plenty of talented musicians, including HippFest regulars Stephen Horne, John Sweeney and Neil Brand, on hand to breathe new life into these old movies.

At the press launch, which took place at the beautifully restored Rosebank Distillery in Falkirk, HippFest director Allison Strauss recalled when she was initially floating the idea of a festival in Bo'ness. “I was told, the festival won’t be considered established until you have at least ten editions,” said Strauss, “and if I decide to start a silent film festival that number of editions will be really hard to achieve because no one will come.” Those naysayers couldn’t have been more wrong. That first edition of HippFest welcomed 1,500 people, while last year’s event reached a combined audience of 6,500. The festival is surely only going to get stronger now that it was among the host of new recipients of multi-year funding from Creative Scotland last week. 

“We are proud that HippFest has reached this milestone edition,” says Strauss, “and can take its place alongside the best arts festivals that Scotland has to offer, cultivating an international and ever-growing community of people with an adventurous appetite for extraordinary cinema.” 

To explore the full programme, head to hippodromecinema.co.uk/hippfest