Hannah McGill

“I’m more of a literature girl really, but one of the reasons I find cinema fascinating is that I don’t really understand it,” she adds. “I understand someone sitting there and writing and writing until they’ve finished a novel. I mean, it’s hard…but I understand it. Cinema has all these different dimensions and all these different skills involved, and that really intrigues me.”

Certainly, it’s no coincidence that film inherited some of its working language from an industry once familiar to McGill’s university city. A lexicon furnished with words such as ‘crew’ and ‘launch’ prompts shipbuilding comparisons—as does the titanic effort required by people of numerous trades and professions to ‘make the thing sail’.

“It combines elements of theatre, television, literature, music, cinematography,” McGill says. “As a manner of storytelling I think it intrigues me because it’s so bloody difficult. It’s incredible anyone actually pulls it off.”

It’s this storytelling element that’s to be championed, perhaps more than ever, in McGill’s debut year as artistic director. The underlying theme of the world’s longest film festival —with consecutive days running from August 15th to 26th— is ‘Cinema and the Written Word’.

An extended retrospective devoted to the work of screenwriter Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Hold Your Man), along with collaborative initiatives with the International Book Festival and the National Theatre of Scotland, will go some way to realising the potential strength of such a broad beam.

Do Loos’ achievements act as an inspiration to artistry for those in the film industry?

“I hope so,” answers McGill. “There’s certainly more acknowledgment today of the importance of the screenwriter and of the significance of the script in making a good film— rather than the theory that you start with an idea, and as long as you’ve got a good director it will work out.”

The list of those who will appear in person to discuss the importance of screenwriting, amongst other things, includes Julie Delpy, Bob Hoskins, Mike Leigh and John Waters.

If the lucrative liners of Hollywood have grown dependent on recycling with a voracity that would make even Al Gore yell “Whoa there!” the International Festival is set to remind audiences there’s often more to a cinema release than a tried and tested story, some smoke, a truckload of mirrors, and $100m.

“There’s an amazing film that I’m in love with and trying to convert people to,” says McGill.

The piece in question, Nina Menkes’ Phantom Love, makes the audience privy to the inner landscape of a woman in the act of being ‘dissatisfied’ by her lover.

McGill adds: “That is a strange and beautiful thing. To me it’s a really pure filmmaker’s vision in that it’s a piece of work that would have to be cinema, it couldn’t be anything else. It’s fascinating and absolutely stunning to look at.”

Jessica Yu’s Protagonist is a documentary that breaks down the idea of storytelling by examining real lives and how they operate as narratives.

Life and death are recurring themes, from Martine Doyen’s Komma, that finds its lead character waking up in a bodybag, to Andrew Kötting’s document, In the Wake of a Deadad. The latter sees artist Kötting making an enormous inflatable dummy of his dead father and carrying it to various places of emotional significance. McGill describes it as “very moving, in its own weird way”.

Also promising to stir emotion is the Festival’s opening-night gala film, the UK Premiere of David Mackenzie's Hallam Foe, starring Jamie Bell and Sophia Myles. In presenting the film, the Festival goes Through the Looking Glass somewhat in that it is set in Edinburgh itself and has voyeurism as a central theme. The original novel was written by former Scotsman journalist Peter Jinks.

I wondered if the film had the potential to provide a new vision of Edinburgh to contrast with the one Trainspotting offered us over a decade ago.

“In some ways it’s an inheritor of Trainspotting because they both capture something elemental about the city,” responds McGill.
 
“It’s fairly remarkable that there aren’t more films that see the great beauty of Edinburgh,” she adds.  “Scottish Screen work very hard on having location shooting happening in Scotland, but often it’s more the Scottish countryside that people are attracted to rather than Scottish cities—I don’t really know why. I think it would be lovely to have more films made here. It’s very nice to have an opening film that’s such a tribute to the city— that’s a great thing.”

Perhaps it’s the rest of the world’s preoccupation with Scotland’s past that has led to the preference for more rustic realisations of the country. The stony path winds from MGM’s now infamous Brigadoon (1954), right up to the likes of the more recent Braveheart (1995) and Rob Roy (1995).

Addressing this image is one of the continuing achievements of the International Film Festival, now in its 61st year. For these eleven days, Edinburgh becomes the lightning rod through which cinema’s mysterious energies are channelled.

As that occurs under Hannah McGill’s direction this year, the visiting world can do little else but marvel at the city’s present, not its past.

Related links

www.edfilmfest.org.uk