Meet Edinburgh Film Festival's new director, Paul Ridd

It’s been hard to get a handle on Edinburgh International Film Festival of late. It’s by far the oldest film festival in the UK, but so rocky has its ride been over the past decade or so, it’s impossible to pin down exactly what it stands for anymore. It was saved by Screen Scotland after its parent company, the Centre for the Moving Image, collapsed into administration in 2022. The year before this collapse, it moved from its June slot in the calendar to August, meaning it now has to compete with the world’s greatest performing arts festival for press attention and audiences. And its artistic leadership has been in flux, with the festival burning through directors like the UK burned through prime ministers in the last few years; it seems like a festival forever entering a new era. 

The latest person attempting to bring a sense of stability and purpose to this venerable institution is new director Paul Ridd, who announced the programme for the 77th edition of the festival last week (read some of the highlights here). It’s a bold lineup heavy on world premieres. Almost half the feature screenings this year are laundry-fresh pieces of work that will be making their bow at Edinburgh, and many of these filmmakers are making their first outings as directors, so it’ll be very much a festival of discovery this year.

Ahead of Edinburgh International Film Festival's programme launch, we sat down with Ridd in Edinburgh’s Summerhall, where he and his EIFF team are now based, to learn a bit more about his vision for the Festival's future.

The Skinny: You joined Edinburgh after working in various roles at Picturehouse, including head of acquisitions for Picturehouse Entertainment. Is there an overlap between those roles and your new role as EIFF’s director?

Paul Ridd: It's a similar set of principles, for sure. It's always about thinking about the audience. One of the things that's really delightful about this role at EIFF is obviously working with an amazing team, but also finding a way to support and profile an even wider range of films than what I was doing when I was in acquisitions. There we had a very specific remit in terms of the kinds of movies we were picking up and distributing [mainly arthouse and indie films]. Here at Edinburgh, I get to show films like that, but also support a broader range of movies that we can get behind and give a really good platform to at the festival. So it's an exchange of skills, a different set of skills, but there's a lot of crossover.

What attracted you most to heading up EIFF?

I suppose what really drew me to this opportunity is the incredible legacy the festival has. It's 77 years old, and it has all this amazing history that we're inheriting. But also given the fact we've had to build up a whole infrastructure from scratch in many ways, because we're a completely new entity, the challenge of that – and the prospect of maybe changing a little bit what the festival is, and what the focus of it is – has been very, very exciting.

Who is your new team?

Since day one, I've been working with Emma Boa, the festival’s producer, who's worked with previous iterations of the festival for well over a decade. We've worked very, very closely together, both on the programme and also on building up a team of people. We're at about 13 of us right now who work in our office here at Summerhall, and that's across marketing and booking and guest services and all the different contingent elements that go into putting together the festival. It's been a great experience putting together the team gradually over the last few months, and really building up a set of people who will work very well together.

And in terms of the programming team?

We had about 2,500 submissions across shorts and features, which is obviously a large number of films to deal with and review and look at properly. So we had a team of people that we pulled together, externally, who were all recent graduates from the NFTS [National Film and Television School], recent graduates from the University of Edinburgh, plus some film critics and film professionals. And that team of 17 people helped us see each submission and give each film proper consideration. And then it's really been about, as a team, filtering down to our 40 features, which we've confirmed for the lineup, and five shorts programmes. So it's very much a team effort, with Emma and myself leading on the full final programme.

So will it be a programme made up mostly from submissions?

I've been very pleased with the number of films we've managed to put into the programme that are direct open submissions, because I love the beauty of that process; you know, somebody sending us a film to consider, and then it making its way into competition or out of competition. And then on top of that, of course, there are films that have come to us directly through producer contacts or filmmakers that we know or just relationships that we have.

One thing you’re doing differently this year is not using multiplexes, is that right?

For this year, yes. For us, the footprint is important. When we were thinking back in the early days about how we could cement our relationship with the wider festivals landscape, with the Fringe, with the other festivals we're collaborating with, the TV Festival, the Book Festival, what we wanted to make sure of is that the venues that we used felt that they were proximate and equivalent and embedded into that wider Fringe landscape.

So of course, we have the Cameo, which is a beautiful cinema, and we've got screenings there all the way through the festival. But the non-traditional spaces – spaces like Summerhall or the two Edinburgh University spaces we're using – they are very close, physically, to the Fringe venues. I hope that there's an audience of cinephiles who will come to all our films because they love cinema and they want to discover the work, but I'm hoping that using those non-traditional spaces, and their proximity to the main Fringe, will maybe mean that there'll be some people who might take the risk to go and see a movie, as they would a live event within the Fringe.

EIFF has gone through some turbulent times of late, and lots of changes, which means it’s become a bit harder to pin down Edinburgh’s role in the film landscape and what it stands for anymore. Do you have a clear aim on where the festival is headed?

We set ourselves out with a really ambitious plan from day one, back at the beginning of the year, to really lean into world premieres as a key thing. And I know that's challenging when it comes to the particular part of the year that we're in, because August is obviously just before lots of the big festivals kick off in the autumn – you know, Venice and Toronto and Telluride and places like that.

What we've been trying to do, and what I think we've done very effectively, is build a competition of world premiere films, and used that opportunity to give those films a real platform for their first outing into the world. I think one of the things we've had as an advantage is having the prospect of this £50,000 prize competition for features that the Sean Connery Foundation has supported, and then also having this £15,000 prize for the Thelma Schoonmaker competition for shorts. I think those prizes have really helped us leverage a lot of really cool movies and to get real quality submissions.

So what, in your opinion, should a good festival do? What would be your markers for a successful EIFF?

That’s a very big question. I would say for me, it's all about the audience. And that's about the public audience, that's about the industry audience. From an industry perspective, when I was going into this role on the first day, I was thinking to myself: 'What is it that would attract me to come to this city and come to this festival as a buyer?' And I think the idea of being able to see completely new work is very, very exciting.

But I think that’s also a big incentive for public audiences as well, because if you think about where we are in the calendar, we sit right in the middle of the Fringe, and the Fringe is a space to discover new work in the performing arts across comedy and theatre. I want EIFF to be the same thing for film; to give an opportunity for filmmakers who maybe are making their first or second feature, or even if they're established, to really kind of take their films out and present them to the world for the first time, and really get something out of it. So with that in mind, we've had a big push to get a really strong press presence this year. So you know, people like yourself coming to see films for the first time and getting that first review.

That's really important to me, and really important, I think, to create a bit of industry excitement and buzz around the festival. With that comes all the contingent things which will lead to, you know, being able to get bigger and better films going into the future. That being said, obviously, we've also got a bunch of movies that have played very well at other festivals. So we've got films from Cannes, from Sundance, from Berlin, and the idea of having those films play for the first time in the UK at Edinburgh is very exciting as well. So we've given people a broad range of choices.

Three Film Experiences that have Shaped Paul Ridd's taste in Cinema

Caché (Michael Haneke, 2006)

"I remember seeing Michael Haneke’s film Caché when it first came out at the Corn Exchange cinema in Ipswich with my dad, and I can distinctively remember having an almost out-of-body experience with that film, where I kind of realised what cinema could do, if it was pushed to another level, you know? I have a distinct memory of seeing it and thinking, 'This is the kind of thing I want to dedicate my life to.'

"I realised I want to be, in some way, part of the process that leads to somebody making a film that can have that kind of impact on a person. And I truly believe that cinema has the potential to change people. I know it sounds cheesy, but it's the popular art form that I think has such a capacity for personal change and to facilitate all kinds of conversations and make you look at the world in different ways."

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009)

"I have a very fond memory of seeing Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void, but I guess fond isn’t quite the word. I went to see a midnight screening of it at Hackney Picturehouse back in 2011 or 12 with a very close friend.

"That film is challenging in lots of ways, but I also think it's incredibly beautiful. And I remember feeling, again, that kind of out-of-body experience where you think, ‘This is kind of altering my brain chemistry.’ Like, I'm sitting here watching this film in the middle of the night and it's just taking me to another world – or other worlds – and that's just felt very important to me." Gaspar Noé will be In Conversation at EIFF on 19 Aug – tickets here

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2011)

"I've always been very opinionated and always had strong feelings about films. But when I became a cinema programmer, I realised that seeing films through the lens of not just myself, but through other audience members is an important part of the programming process. Talk to anybody who works in cinema or festival programming, and they’ll tell you a lot of it is about taking yourself out of the picture and thinking, 'OK, this isn't necessarily my cup of tea, but who is this film for?'

"So with that in mind, I have a vivid memory of seeing the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with a full house at the Abbeygate Picturehouse at Bury St Edmunds, which I was programming at the time, and the audience was having an absolute ball with the film. It's not by any means the kind of movie I would go out of my way necessarily to watch for pleasure. But being able to see how a film can touch people and can be important to them, I think it's a very important part of this process because we're the conduit for these films to find their audiences. So I think it's important to kind of maintain a level of open-mindedness when programming."

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The 2024 Edinburgh International Film Festival runs 15-21 Aug at Cameo, Summerhall, inSpace and 50 George Square. Full programme at edfilmfest.org