Inverness Film Festival reveals 2024 programme
Inverness Film Festival is back with another packed lineup that should delight Highland audiences – highlights include new films from Mike Leigh, Sean Baker and Andrea Arnold
Hats off to the Inverness Film Festival. It can be a tricky business securing the most splashy arthouse titles for your film event, but IFF has quietly found a cosy niche for itself in the autumn film calendar that allows it to consistently present a packed programme of bangers to its Highland audience. This year's 22nd edition is no different, with a lineup previewing many of the most exciting films due out this winter, as well as a tasty selection of work from Scottish and international talent.
The festival opens with a strange and humanistic celebration of motherhood: Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, a black comedy in which Amy Adams plays a stay-at-home mum who goes feral. Six days later, the festival closes with the juicy Conclave, a Vatican-set psychological drama that looks like a cross between Succession and a Dan Brown thriller; it features a ridiculously good ensemble cast – Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini, John Lithgow – turning it up to 11.
Elsewhere there’s Hard Truth, the new film from Mike Leigh which reunites him with his Secrets and Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Jesse Eisenberg directs A Real Pain, a spiky road movie featuring two bickering brothers (played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin). We’re also looking forward to Rumours, the wild new film from Guy Maddin, which imagines what would happen if the world leaders got lost in the woods on a G7 summit, and Bird, the long-awaited return to feature films from Andrea Arnold. Another must-see is Anora, the thrilling and sexy modern-day Cinderella story that won director Sean Baker the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year.
In terms of work with a Scottish connection, there’s the bittersweet comedy Late Bloomers, which sees local girl done good Karen Gillan taking a break from Hollywood blockbusters to play an aimless, 28-year-old Brooklynite who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a cranky elderly Polish woman. You’ll also find the latest film from Mark Cousins: A Sudden Glimpse of Deeper Things, his rapturous celebration of undersung Scottish painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. There's also If the Stars Had a Sound, Anthony Cook’s poetic documentary about Mogwai; Cook and Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite will be in Inverness for a Q&A after the screening.
But the programme at Inverness also takes you around the world. From Iran, there's the acclaimed The Seed of the Sacred Fig by Mohammad Rasoulof, who’s currently in exile in Germany after the film got him an eight-year prison sentence back home. Also coming to Inverness on a wave of ecstatic reviews is the Zambian film On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, the second feature from the uber-talented Rungano Nyoni (I Am Not A Witch). You’ll also find the Mumbai-set comedy Sister Midnight, the Himalayan odyssey Shambhala and the Icelandic film When the Light Breaks, which follows an art student over one long summer’s day as she experiences grief, friendship and love. Add to this list No Other Land, an extraordinary documentary by a Palestinian-Israeli collective showing the destruction of the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities.
This is only a taster of this year’s programmel; head to the Eden Court website to check out the full lineup.
Inverness Film Festival 2024, Eden Court, Inverness, 1-7 Nov