More Than Bricks and Mortar: Filmmakers on Filmhouse and EIFF

We speak to a few of the filmmakers and programmers whose careers are intertwined with the Filmhouse & Edinburgh Film Festival, and ask about their hopes for the future

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 31 Oct 2022
  • Edinburgh Filmhouse

No one will miss Scotland’s self-appointed Centre for the Moving Image, the charity that fell into administration on 6 October. But anyone who cares even an inkling for cinema will dearly lament the loss of the three institutions CMI took with it: two much-loved cinemas, Filmhouse in Edinburgh and the Belmont in Aberdeen, and the 75-year-old Edinburgh International Film Festival. Over 100 staff were laid off with zero notice and are now pursuing legal action. The CMI’s board claimed that the “perfect storm” of the sharply-rising energy costs, together with both the lasting impacts of the pandemic and the rapidly emerging cost of living crisis were the reasons for their swift collapse, but it’s become increasingly evident that this organisation had issues long before COVID-19 or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It’s hard to overstate the damage these closures have done to the Scottish capital’s film scene. The city is left without a venue dedicated to arthouse and repertory cinema. The lively school’s programmes run by Filmhouse’s education wing have gone. Smaller festivals and independent programmers who used Filmhouse as a venue are now scrambling for alternatives. A crucial community space has vanished overnight and it’s hard to imagine how it will be replaced in the near future. The loss of the long-running festival similarly stings, especially as the 75th edition saw an artistic resurgence with new Creative Director Kristy Matheson delivering an edition full of thoughtful curation and tonnes of promise for the future. If there isn’t a 76th edition, it will be a crying shame.

It feels like the Scottish film community has already cycled through most stages of grief by now – certainly ‘denial’, ‘depression’ and ‘anger’. They haven’t settled on ‘acceptance’ just yet though. A group quickly sprung up after the closure with ambitions of saving these institutions. It held an extremely positive meeting on 14 October between members of Creative Scotland, former employees of CMI and other members of the film community where it was suggested there is the political will and capital for these vital community assets to be salvaged.

In this spirit of hope, we’ve invited some Edinburgh filmmakers and key figures in Filmhouse and EIFF’s storied history to reflect on the closures, share their memories of these possibly-lost institutions and dream of what a Filmhouse and EIFF 2.0 could look like if they can be raised from the ashes.

Shock, Sadness, Anger

EIFF has had many great programmers over the years, but few can claim to have had the impact of Lynda Myles. She was invited to join the EIFF team in 1968 after writing a blistering open letter in the Scotsman about the festival’s tepid programming and quickly became the integral creative force during its glorious run in the 70s (acting as Artistic Director 1973-1980) when EIFF was among the most innovative, influential and well-respected film festivals on the planet.

“The news of the closure was devastating, unimaginable and it’s critically important that both the film festival and Filmhouse are resurrected,” Myles says of her initial reaction to the closure. The news reminded Myles of an essay by Martin Scorsese in Harper’s magazine last year. “Scorsese wrote, ‘We can’t depend on the movie business, such as it is, to take care of cinema.’ We need independent cinemas like Filmhouse which offer a unique space to watch a wide range of films.”

Another legendary figure at EIFF and Filmhouse is Jim Hickey. He was the Head Programmer when the Filmhouse first opened its doors on Lothian Road in 1979 and succeeded Myles as EIFF’s Artistic Director in 1980. “I was shocked that the staff were treated so badly and angry that there were no warnings or concerted efforts to attract financial support to even begin to deal with the emergency,” Hickey tells us. “Now there is a huge sadness about what was thrown away so quickly. I knew something of the background to the gathering storm over recent years but not the full extent of it. I get upset just talking about it now.”

Filmmaker Mark Cousins was at the heart of an EIFF revolution in the mid-90s, when he was EIFF’s artistic director. And before it closed, he was very much part of the Filmhouse furniture, with his curly mop of hair often to be spotted in the cinema’s front row. “When I wake up at 6.30am, I always check what's on at Filmhouse,” Cousins tells us. “I visit it as a reward to myself for hard work. I go there to refill. I used to say that you get vitamin D from a movie screen. Filmhouse Screen 1 is my vitamin D.”

His relationship with EIFF is more complicated. “I worked at the festival and so knew it intimately for a while. In fact, I was made director of it because I said I'd change almost everything about it and start again, and I did. No organisation is more central to my own development, or my sense of what movies are, but I feel that it didn't always keep ahead of social, technological and creative change. I love the idea of it and am ready to fall back in love with the reality of it.”

Cousins isn’t the only filmmaker whose career and sense of cinema are interwoven with Filmhouse and EIFF. A few days after news of the CMI’s collapse broke, Limbo director Ben Sharrock was one of the most articulate voices to express his dismay at the situation. Sharrock grew up in Edinburgh and was a pupil at Boroughmuir High School, just five minutes up the road from Filmhouse. He didn’t hold back when we asked about his reactions.

“I was frustrated,” says Sharrock. “Angry. Saddened but ultimately powerless. It’s that horrible feeling of thinking that… surely something can be done. Surely this isn’t it? But knowing that I can’t personally do anything to change it or fix it. I wish I could. I would love to be involved in figuring out how to revive these essential parts of our city as I’m sure lots of local filmmakers and cinephiles would be.”

When we ask Edinburgh filmmaker Hope Dickson Leach how she felt when she heard the news of the closure, she talks of grief. “I feel like someone has died,” says Dickson Leach. “It’s especially painful after the global grief that I (as many) have experienced during the pandemic. There is so little resilience or hope to push back against the seeming inevitability of the loss of our film culture. As someone who has also been working with theatre in the last few years and engaging with Scottish culture at large, it feels like we are at the beginning of severe cultural loss that I don’t know how we will recover from as a country.”

A Place of Film Education

Filmhouse and EIFF's importance to film talent development in this country is considerable. Just look at the most exciting release of the autumn: Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, which opened the 75th EIFF just a few months ago. While promoting the film at its English premiere at London Film Festival, Wells expressed her heartbreak at the news, explaining that Filmhouse is where she got her first taste of filmmaking as part of the cinema’s innovative scheme SKAMM (aka Scottish Kids are Making Movies).

Another Edinburgh film kid turned good is Ninian Doff. His debut Get Duked!, a riotous class comedy about four working-class lads being hunted for sport by deranged members of the Highland gentry, opened the festival in 2019. “I still can't believe it happened,” says Doff of that gala screening. “EIFF championed my little film and gave it the full red carpet treatment of a massive Hollywood blockbuster. It was one of the greatest moments of my life and I'm forever grateful for it. It breaks my heart that it could even be possible that future filmmakers might not experience the magic that is Edinburgh International Film Festival."

Like Wells, Doff was an alumnus of SKAMM. “When I was 12 I went to the Filmhouse to the first meeting of a young person's film club set up by Shiona Wood and Mark Cousins," he recalls. "Once SKAMM was in my life, I never wanted to be anything other than a film director. I'd go to the Filmhouse every Saturday, sit in its cinema seats and actually get to make films!”

The scheme also blagged Doff a press pass to EIFF. Every summer from the age of 13 to 16, he’d immerse himself in world cinema. “I'd watch about five films a day and still remember staggering home with my mind full of images, crashing down asleep only to wake up to hit the first 9am screening the next day and do it all again. Through SKAMM's projects and their generosity in letting me attend the festival, I honestly learned more than I ever did on any film course.”

Sharrock wasn’t part of SKAMM (“I fancied myself as more of an actor in those days,” he says), but as an adult, he attended EIFF Talent Lab in 2014 and found it similarly galvanizing: “This was the best film development programme I ever did – better than Berlin Talents and BFI Network (sorry Berlin and London). We had a wonderfully talented cohort – many of whom have gone on to great things. We were taken through a brilliant programme led by Holly Daniels. I came away believing I could make films for a living.”

The public programme was also invigorating. “That year at EIFF I saw Club Sandwich by Fernando Eimbcke,” Sharrock recalls, “and I was so inspired by it that I wanted to leave the cinema, pick up a camera and make my first feature immediately.” A year later, Sharrock had done just that. His wonderful debut Pikadero screened in competition at EIFF's 2016 edition and walked off with the Michael Powell award for best British feature.

A cinema audience watching a film. They are lit by the glow of the screen.
The crowd at a Filmhouse screening. Photo: Chris Scott

As co-founder of SKAMM, Cousins was a mentor to many of these talented filmmakers, but he describes Filmhouse and EIFF as being just as vital to his own career as an adult as it was to the young film nuts like Wells and Doff. “Filmhouse and EIFF weren't just things I did in my spare time,” he says. “They were what energised that spare time. I saw a Japanese documentary at Filmhouse – The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On – when I was planning my film about neo-Nazism, and it completely changed my movie, which in turn really advanced my work and creative life.” He also cites an EIFF retrospective of the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak as another pivotal moment in his film education. “That really opened my mind to Indian cinema. Thirty years later I'm still feeling the effect of those screenings. I now know Indian movie stars and directors and build Indian cinema into a lot of what I do specifically because of those ten days watching Ghatak films.”

Like Cousins, the festival was where Dickson Leach’s career in film began. Throughout the late 90s and early 00s you’d have found her running around behind the scenes at Filmhouse in one of the many roles she held at EIFF. Over the years she was a submissions coordinator, head of screenings, jury coordinator and assistant to the Artistic Director. When we speak to her, many memories come tumbling out.

“Managing a test screening with Béla Tarr as we set up the subtitles for Werckmeister Harmonies [2000] was one of the strangest things I’ve done, not to be outdone at the horror of having to show Liv Ullman the damaged print of her film Faithless [2000] following an accident at a press screening.” Dickson Leach adds: “The projectionists at the Filmhouse, incidentally, are some of the best people I’ve worked with in the film industry full stop, and the way they handled both things was with the height of professionalism and full of the love for cinema you could count on from everyone who worked there.”

Can Filmhouse and Edinburgh International Film Festival return?

It’s abundantly clear that Filmhouse and EIFF – and visionary programming by people like Lynda Myles and Jim Hickey – have touched countless lives. Without them, we might not have filmmakers of the calibre of Charlotte Wells, Ben Sharrock, Mark Cousins, Hope Dickson Leach and Ninian Doff. Their resurrections are essential for Scotland’s fragile cinema ecosystem, but it would be foolish to look back at Filmhouse and EIFF with rose-tinted glasses. As indispensable as these institutions were, they were not without their flaws too. If there is to be a rebirth of both, the shape and character of what emerges shouldn’t be carbon copies. We ask our interviewees what they hope for, if there is to be a Filmhouse and EIFF 2.0.

Hickey says: “When Filmhouse returns, it must have at least two cinemas with large screens with the best sound system to ensure the audience in [a] dark room shares that unique cinema experience. The premises should ideally have a cafe bar for additional revenue but also to build local audience loyalty. There should also be a loyalty scheme which gives members discounts, priority booking, etc. Of course, Filmhouse just had all of this and it is also what guided our planning back in the 1980s. So the challenge is programming and marketing, as it ever was.”

As much as he values Filmhouse and EIFF, Sharrock agrees that there are areas in which both institutions could improve. “In general, I think arthouse cinemas need to lean into being creative hubs for film appreciation and community that have an appeal to young people while retaining a multi-generational pull," he suggests. "The Filmhouse always had strong programming but unfortunately that’s just not enough these days. To put it simply, it needs to be a place where young creatives want to 'hang out' and spend money for there to be a future. It needs to feel like a bright, modern and exciting place to be. They need to get rid of the carpeted floors and go easier on the fabric. I think it needs to be a year-round refuge for a progressive filmgoing community. A meeting place. A workspace.”

Myles' feeling is that if the festival returns, it should build on the green shoots of this summer’s propitious new-look edition: “Kristy Matheson, the new Creative Director of EIFF, demonstrated this year that she has the imagination and energy to re-invigorate and reinvent the festival. Ways need to be found for her to be able to take her creative vision further for a 2023 event.”

Cousins’ suggestions are short and sweet. “Keep the great films. Employ more working-class people. Look at what other, similar places are doing, and do that even better.” He also throws the gauntlet down to the people of Edinburgh, who he feels took these institutions for granted. “Another question isn't what Filmhouse and EIFF should do, it's what the audience should do,” he says. “Use it or lose it.”

As much as Dickson Leach adored Filmhouse, she wasn’t attached to its bricks and mortar on Lothian Road. “Filmhouse has lived in other buildings and I would love it if it could return somewhere more accessible,” she says, “bespoke and fit for purpose in a venue that will last into the 21st century.” But before any more ambitious plans are thought up, she reckons there needs to be some deep thinking about the future of exhibition in this country.

“We need to look at Scottish cinema’s relationship with the other arts organisations and institutions in Scotland if we are to retain building spaces that can deliver not just the art that we crave and need, but also the community engagements that these spaces offer so well. We need to engage with exhibition more broadly before any money is spent on a space. What is it that people want to see? Why do they go to the cinema? What will they pay for? What do they come for?”

We’ll leave the final word to Doff, who simply thinks these institutions are too important to die. They need to be supported and saved at all costs. “This is so much more than a cinema closing down,” Doff says, “this is about Edinburgh's creativity and artistic soul. I'm literally an Edinburgh kid who walked in as a child and then stepped out as the director of the opening gala festival film. That says everything about how powerful and magical these places are.”

The next Save the Filmhouse public meeting takes place 1 Nov, Grassmarket Community Centre, 5.15pm. To join this meeting and future meetings, sign up to savethefilmhouse@googlegroups.com