One of the basic mechanisms of cinematic art is point of view (PoV). The existence of the camera, together with the different possibilities and combinations of PoV, shapes some of cinema’s fundamental questions: who observes this world, what do they see, and how do they see it? We live in an increasingly diverse world. This division not only structures social media and the information we are fed by algorithms, but also the world around us and our political conversations. The same systems are now generating the images themselves, which makes the question of who is looking, and from where, more pressing rather than less. Many filmmakers today are attempting to grapple with what perspective means in such a world, and with the importance of communication and collaboration across different points of view. Several films at this year’s EIFF approached these questions from very different directions.
Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea wrestles with multiple perspectives through a family drama about ageing and care. The film presents its dilemma upfront: Amanda (Juliette Binoche) discovers her stepfather Martin (Tom Courtenay) having sex with her mother Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who has advanced dementia and, according to her doctor, is no longer considered capable of consenting to sex. Amanda calls the police to demonstrate the seriousness of the situation, and the film subsequently becomes a field of competing perspectives: those of institutions such as the police, the doctor, the court-appointed assessor and the care home, alongside Amanda’s, Martin’s, Amanda’s daughter Sara’s (Florence Hunt), and, perhaps most importantly, Leslie’s, a perspective that could easily be neglected.
Yet, unlike many social dramas, Hammer’s London-set story is not about putting these perspectives against one another. Rather than creating an arena in which one perspective must prevail, the film searches for a compassionate understanding in which no single point of view can provide a perfect answer. Despite the limited screen time given to some of the supporting characters, Hammer takes care to give each of them a perspective of their own, refusing to reduce them to simply the good or the bad. They are all bound by different rules and beliefs, while each, in their own way, hopes for what is best for Leslie. Their understandings of what that means simply differ. There is no perfect resolution in life, and the film allows that uncertainty to remain.
Finlay Pretsell’s Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon offers a more formally intriguing meditation on PoV and authorship. Traditionally, auteur theory places the director at the centre of authorship, as the figure who ultimately controls the work. Douglas Gordon, however, is himself an artist deeply concerned with filmmaking. The Turner Prize-winning visual artist is best known for works such as 24 Hour Psycho, his radical reworking of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller in which the film is slowed to approximately two frames per second, extending it to precisely 24 hours.
As the documentary’s protagonist, Gordon becomes an unavoidable challenge to the director’s authority. He is not simply the subject being filmed but someone who understands filmmaking and actively intervenes in Pretsell’s vision. The relationship between filmmaker and subject gradually shifts from collaboration to something more complicated, raising the question of who is actually making the film. It may not be the most straightforward entry point into Gordon’s work, but the title, Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon, is telling: the film can feel as much like another work in Gordon’s filmography as a documentary about him.
An even more extreme example of PoV comes from Chee Keong Cheung’s Bad Day at the Office, the opening film of Midnight Madness. Shot almost entirely from the protagonist’s first-person perspective, using GoPro cameras, the film often feels closer to an action game than conventional narrative cinema. It recalls the classic B-movies of Hong Kong’s golden age, with their abundance of violence and blood, and its commitment to this restricted perspective gives the film a distinctive physical immediacy. Yet its ending shifts away from this PoV and attempts to gesture towards a political metaphor and a deeper meaning. Unfortunately, the transition does not fully work. Without enough preparation, the shift misses the chance to turn its own device against itself, and to ask why we have been made to watch the world this way.
The most playful exploration of perspective comes from Theodore Schaefer’s The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight. The film consists of three intertwined stories set in New York, with Gus Birney playing three different women: Violet, Sinopia and Jade. Although they occupy different social worlds and have distinct personalities, they are played by the same actor and look exactly alike. The device turns the question of PoV into something more fundamental than simply deciding where to place the camera. The same face becomes the visual starting point for three different lives, suggesting that identity and perspective do not necessarily reside in appearance.
The film takes this idea even further through Constance Shulman’s unnamed woman, who drags a suitcase full of clocks through New York in search of a doppelgänger she is convinced is trying to steal her identity. Her story initially seems detached from the three women played by Birney, but her search for a duplicate of herself introduces another variation on the film’s central concern: what happens when the distinction between one person and another becomes unstable?
Indeed, at a time when the future of cinema feels increasingly uncertain under the growing presence of AI, filmmakers may need to return to the foundations of the art form: to ask not only what cinema can show us, but why we still need cinema to see the world at all.
The Edinburgh International Film Festival ran from 13-19 August 2026.
