Edinburgh Film Festival: The 2024 award winners

The curtain came down on the 2024 Edinburgh International Film Festival last night with the world premiere of Carla J Easton and Blair Young’s vibrant documentary Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands, and the Festival could hardly have chosen a better closer.

It's a joyous and fierce celebration of the girl bands from Scotland who have fallen through the cracks of music history. An antidote to the stale (and usually very male) music documentary, the film introduces us to a succession of kickass female musicians who all have juicy stories of forming their bands and making records, but unfortunately they all end up being royally let down by the sexist music industry. But against the odds, these women made amazing music; I’m sure most of the crowd last night who were new to bands like Strawberry Switchblade, Sophisticated Boom Boom and His Latest Flame went straight home to their preferred streaming service to hunt down many of the featured tracks. 

Still from Manny Wolfe

EIFF also handed out its new awards last night: The Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence and The Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for Short Filmmaking Excellence. Schoonmaker, the legendary film editor, has been a delightful presence at the festival this year and was on hand to deliver the prize which bears her name. She started by saying that she was particularly happy to lend her name to the short film prize because a short film is how she started her long and fruitful collaboration with director Martin Scorsese.

“I was on a little six-week course at NYU,” she recalls, “and because the negative of Marty’s short film had been butchered in the edit, my professor asked the class if anyone knew enough about editing to try and help him. And unfortunately, I did. So for the first time in my life, I met this brilliant director because of a short film, and I helped him put it back together.”

Schoonmaker handed the short film prize to American filmmaker Trevor Neuhoff for his comic noir Manny Wolfe, which tells the story of a struggling actor in 1940s Hollywood who gets his big break when he’s cast in a horror movie – he also happens to be a werewolf. Neuhoff was a gracious winner. “I think everyone knows, short films are always a passion project,” he said. “You put everything into them and so did everyone else in the competition. I think we’re all friends now," he said of all the filmmakers competing for the short film prize, "which I don’t think happens a lot at festivals.”

Still from The Ceremony

Jason Connery, the son of Sean Connery, handed out the feature film prize to Bradford filmmaker Jack King for The Ceremony, a black and white drama set in the Yorkshire hills following two migrant workers looking for a place to bury their undocumented colleague. “This means so much to me," said a shocked King. "I’m gonna start bawling in a minute. This is the first film festival I ever came to as a teenager; it’s my spiritual home.”

The Ceremony is King’s feature debut, and Neuhoff also said that this was the first festival he’s attended as a director. EIFF director Paul Ridd noted he was excited the prizes went to newcomers. “These new EIFF awards were set up to support new and emerging filmmakers in their careers,” he said. “Both these films show immense vision and skill at connecting with audiences and we wish both filmmakers the very best for the future.”

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Edinburgh International Film Festival is over for another year, but you can keep up to date with all of The Skinny's coverage here