During the lockdown summer of 2020, with Edinburgh’s usual festivities cancelled, the tradition of the theatrical ‘ghost light’ inspired a display of beams of lights emanating from the city’s empty venues. When theatres were allowed to open again, we revelled in the power of the shared experiences we’d missed, and the arts bounced back. However, plans for a major restoration of Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre had already been drawn up prior to Covid, and in summer 2022 the theatre closed again. Not dark and empty this time though – the contractors moved in, and a huge and expensive process was underway.…
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Directors: Ilaria de Laurentiis, Raffaele Brunetti, Andrea Paolo Massara The great Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini is best known for films such as Rome Open City (1945), Germany Year Zero (1948) and Journey To Italy (1954), the last starring his third wife, Ingrid Bergman. These movies are startling in their raw texture and storytelling power, coming across like fragile works-in-progress and yet they’re indisputably complete. This new feature-length documentary doesn’t go over such neo-realist classics but instead explores the director’s life between 1956 and 1977, during which time some of his interests and priorities changed, while his attitudes hardened. He…
Writer: Giacomo Boeri, Alberta Molajoni Director: Giacomo Boeri Giacomo Boeri’s film Stories for Sandro is an imaginative account filmed over five years of Sandro, Boeri’s father, who is living with Alzheimer’s. Boeri cherishes the hope that if he can somehow use film to recreate some of Sandro’s memories, then perhaps the disease can be stayed. But he’s honest enough to include voices of dissent. He films his mother spelling out how Alzheimer’s progresses – Sandro will stop being able to recognise those closest to him. Whole chunks of his past memories will simply disappear. Boeri over time has to recognise…
Writer and Director: Akio Fujimoto Lost Land is not a a sophisticated film and at times you could wish for a bit more sign-posting and closer attention to continuity. But director and writer Akio Fujimoto gradually conveys a story of great power, following a group of Rohingya Muslims making the perilous journey from a refugee camp to hoped-for safety in Malaysia. What is particularly unusual is that the central figures are all Rohingyas, speaking in their native language. For about half the film, we follow the group from their frightening escape from a refugee camp. We’ve never told where this…
Writer and Director: Ryosuke Hayazaka It is fair to describe The Unluckiest Girl in the World as a little oddity. At well under an hour it is certainly short and the approach taken by writer / director Ryosuke Hayazaka is at times, strange. Aged 27 and working in Human Relations Yamanoura describes herself as The Unluckiest Girl in the World. Her fiancé vanished the day after proposing and she finds it hard to dump her current boyfriend despite his infidelity and habit of borrowing, but not repaying, money. When strolling in the street Yamanoura inevitably steps in gum. True to…
Writer: Chezdan Mills Director: Max James Walker Chezdan Mills achieved a degree of notoriety on the reality TV show The World’s Strictest Parents as a fish-out-of-water gay teenager living with a very religious American family who preached anti-gay sermons in their church. It is tempting to be glib and say the experience was the making of him as Mills went on to earn a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Film Production ( at Salford University- just a brisk walk from tonight’s venue) and has now produced a short LGBTQ+ comedy series Conversations with my Therapist for release on streaming…
Writer: Peter Arnott Director: Hannah Bradley Croall The interrogation of Sir Roger Casement by an official, as depicted in this play, can be viewed as a microcosm of the conflict between Irish nationalists and the British Empire, on the brink of the Easter Rising in 1916. But it’s much more than that. In a Q&A after the opening night’s performance, playwright Peter Arnott cited the complexity of Casement and his story as the element that first attracted him to tackle the subject. In a superbly cast and performed revival of the play originally commissioned for the centenary of the Rising,…
Director: Daniele Rugo Life Support is the most powerful, urgent film you are ever likely to see. International doctors speak directly to camera over the course of some fourteen months as they return again and again to offer help to hospitals in Gaza. While they undoubtedly risk their own lives, their vision remains steadily on the people they are trying to help. Each speaks calmly and candidly, stressing the importance of being there to advocate for Gaza and to bear witness to the ongoing atrocities. Beneath the calm observations of Daniele Rugo’s documentary, a collage of talking heads and footage…