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Scotsman
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh International Film Festival reviews: Hysteria Concessions On the Sea
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Hysteria ★★★★☆ Concessions ★★☆☆☆ On the Sea ★★☆☆☆ In Transit ★★★☆☆ Receiving its UK premiere at this year's EIFF, the provocative new German film Hysteria kicks off like a horror movie, specifically a found footage movie, even more specifically a Paranormal Activity film. There are static night vision cameras, sleeping inhabitants and malevolent intruders, only the intruders aren't spirits and the footage isn't trying to elicit jump scares. Instead it's security footage of a racist attack on a family of Turkish immigrants unaware of the fire burning white through the frame as they sleep. Except it's not that either. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad As we cut to an exterior shot of a burning set we realise it's a recreation of the aforementioned atrocity for a movie based on a real arson attack that took place in Germany in 1993. Hysteria | Edinburgh International Film Festival It's an intriguingly slippery way to start — and indicative of Hysteria's modus operandi as German writer/director Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay uses the behind-the-scenes conceit to make a film about the racial problems in his home country that also explores the complexities and ethics of making films that allow arthouse audiences to feel better about themselves for engaging with these themes from a safe distance. The catalyst for all this is the revelation that an actual copy of the Quran has been burned up during the filming of the aforementioned arson attack, an act of desecration that offends the Muslim extras that the film-within-the-film's Turkish-German director Yigit (Serkan Kaya) has hired to boost his project's authenticity. Whether this was a prop gaff or a deliberately incendiary move on Yigit's part to elicit the performances he's after is never disclosed, but the fall-out takes on a strange thriller dimension of its own when the footage of the scene subsequently goes missing after the production's lowly intern Elif (Devrim Lingnau) is tasked with looking after it. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Büyükatalay keeps the focus on Elif initially, drawing us into her sense of panic and ratcheting up the tension as she loses the keys to Yigit's apartment en route to storing the footage, and then tries to cover up her mistake only to find herself stalked by a stranger who may or may not have some connection to the movie. The film uses this creeping sense of dread to tease out its larger thematic ideas, particularly as we start to learn more about Elif's own background as the white-passing daughter of a Turkish immigrant. But just as you're starting to get a handle on it, Büyükatalay switches gears again, letting the film veer into whodunnit territory with an extended, grimly ironic confrontation scene that may make slightly heavy satirical work of tying everything together, but also cleverly acknowledges the value and limitations of filmmaking when it comes to addressing hot-button issues. Sadly, the limitations of films about films are unintentionally exposed in another festival title, Concessions, which had its world premiere over the weekend and is one of ten films competing for the Sean Connery Prize for Filmmaking Excellence. It's notable mainly, if at all, as the last film of the late Michael Madsen, the Quentin Tarantino regular who broke through in Reservoir Dogs. Here Madsen plays a very Tarantino-lite character, that of a fading Hollywood stunt double called Rex Fuel, who shows up to see a movie he's worked on at a scheduled-for-closure independent cinema on its final day of business. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Madsen enters the film in a scene lifted directly from Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which ends up being less an act of homage than indicative of the depressing reality that this once-mighty actor should have to bow out with a groaning cameo in a fan-boyish movie devoid of a single original idea. The film isn't really a Tarantino knock off, though, and, despite its setting, nor is it really a riff on Peter Bogdanovich's New Hollywood Classic The Last Picture Show. Instead it's a Kevin Smith tribute, with the plot, structure, character types, story arcs, pop-culture diatribes about Star Wars, even the rhythms and intonations in the actors' line readings mimicking Smith's breakthrough movie Clerks so slavishly you start to wonder why Concessions' 23-year-old writer/director Mas Bouzidi didn't just use AI and be done with it. It's certainly odd that he'd want to subsume his own voice so completely so early in his career — and the film's pandering celebration of the power of the big screen experience in the age of streaming would have been more convincing if it had offered up something new. Fellow competition nominee On the Sea is also disappointing, a kind of glum, queer-themed unrequited love story that puts a May-December spin on Brokeback Mountain in its regressive plot about a closeted, middle-aged Welsh mussel picker (Barry Ward) who falls for a young, itinerant deckhand (Lorne MacFadyen) in a small village in Anglesey. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Novelist-turned-filmmaker Helen Walsh's sophomore feature isn't quite clear about when it's set; nobody seems to have a smart phone, or even a mobile, but there's nothing that specifically dates it to a late 20th century setting beyond the uproar homosexuality seems to inspire among the locals and Walsh's own groaningly obvious juxtaposition of her repressed protagonist hitting a local cruising spot in one scene and then listening to a church sermon about sin (with his wife and son in tow) in the next. She also piles on the misery, giving Ward's already tormented Jack a terminal illness diagnosis to add to the tragedy of being gay in a dated movie that doesn't seem to realise God's Own Country, Weekend, Passages and All of Us Strangers have shifted the needle in terms of the range and types of stories gay characters can front. A better version of this story is to be found in yet another competition entry, In Transit, an American indie about an unsure-of-herself 20-something who forms a curious bond with a older, successful female painter who's visiting her sleepy rural Maine hometown on an artist's retreat. Though it's pretty clear the direction their charged relationship is going to take from the moment Jennifer Ehle's Ilse asks Alex Sarrigeorgiou's soon-to-be-unemployed barmaid Lucy to pose for her, the film — which is directed by Jaclyn Bethany from script by Sarrigeorgiou — uses the artist/muse dynamic to subtly explore the rut both women have fallen in a realistic way without resorting to life-or-death melodrama. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until 20 August. For more information and tickets visit:
Scotsman
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Festivals diary: Why everything is broken and one comedian's famous heckler
Eva Victor told the Edinburgh International Film Festival is was not her first time in Edinburgh in August Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... There was a bit of a tired feeling around the Fringe this weekend. The bars and gardens were packed with revellers, but some of the flyering performers seemed jaded. I heard quite a few telling people that this weekend was the last chance to see their show, the consequence of this year's trend for shorter runs in a bid to cut costs. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The implications of a two week run are clear: closing down a show just as reviews and word of mouth recommendations are starting to come in is a tough thing to have to do, but the alternative is getting into even higher levels of debt amid soaring accommodation costs in Edinburgh. Eva Victor in Sorry, Baby | EIFF Some performers have told me they are living entirely on Pot Noodles and carry out beer as they do their best to avoid the pricey street food stalls as their main source of nutrition in an attempt to stay within budget. No wonder everyone is looking a bit pasty. But even the facilities were starting to get tired out. One side of George Square Gardens was having a water supply problem on Saturday afternoon, with the entire toilet block closed and out of order for a period, while a member of bar staff was heard to cry 'everything's broken today', as she struggled to change a wonky line on a beer tap. It was yet another relentlessly sunny August weekend in Edinburgh, maybe we're all getting a bit bored of them. Bring on the rain and let the tourists get out their Pac a Macs and we'll all get a second wind and start to feel more Fringe again. Mummy issues Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Comedian Hannah Morton has had a tricky time with her audience during her Fringe run. From one group of the "most drunk people I have ever seen in my life", as well as an entire roomful of quiet people who did not laugh once through the hour-long performance, the last thing she needed was an unruly heckler to add to the mix. But performing her debut show about her side hustle life as a children's entertainer, she was grilled by one audience member who criticised her script. In a segment about "home hens" - hen parties held at home - she was surprised to be berated by one woman, who started lecturing her on why she had not defined the "home hen" before starting to speak." Scottish comedy legend Elaine C Smith | National World She started going on at me about how not everyone knew what a home hen was in front of the audience," said Ms Morton, who says a good chunk of her show is given over to talking about her 'mummy issues'. "I was like, 'Mother! What are you doing?'" Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The heckler was none other than Ms Morton's mum, Scottish comedy legend Elaine C Smith. From two people in an attic to Edinburgh International Film Festival opening At the launch of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Eva Victor, director, writer and actress of opening film Sorry, Baby, admitted it was not the first time she had been to Edinburgh in August. 'I came here in 2014 as part of the Fringe festival as part of an improv show in an attic that only two people ever came to,' she told the packed audience.
BBC News
a day ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Sean Connery's legacy that is helping young filmmakers
Sean Connery became a patron of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) in 1996 and his first task was to bring home the UK premiere of Dragonheart, the fantasy adventure in which he voices a the next 14 years, he brought not just films but friends and filmmakers. He was at almost every festival, packing as many films into the day as he and his wife Micheline could manage as well as seeing shows at the other city festivals - Black Watch at the Fringe in 2006 was one of his favourite finds."He loved the Edinburgh International Film Festival," says his son Jason Connery."He would bring people and he would talk about it."And people would be astonished when they came with him and saw the real adoration that many Scots had for dad."He wasn't a particularly showbizzy guy, he didn't go to that many events so it was lovely to see him in Edinburgh, happy and relaxed, and acknowledged by everyone around him." After Sir Sean's death in 2020, Jason, his brother Stephane and the rest of the Connery family were keen to maintain his connection to the festival he had championed."He left some money and directions that we should go out as a family and find things that were important to him and hopefully make a difference" says Jason who co-founded FirstStage Studios in Leith, whose most recent production was Department Q."So when we started the foundation, it became a very obvious thing for us to get involved in Scotland with dad being born here and also because of the storytelling in the film industry." Set up in 2022, the foundation awarded its first grants just six months later to filmmaking projects in Scotland as well as a number of initiatives in the Bahamas, the two places Connery called home in later foundation has been particularly crucial to EIFF which closed down in October 2021 along with Filmhouse and the Belmont in Aberdeen, when its parent company, the Centre for the Moving Image went into it returned, under new stewardship, it's a smaller, shorter festival, with fewer films. And yet it's able to offer one of the biggest cash prizes at any festival – the £50,000 Sean Connery Prize for Filmmaking year's inaugural prize was won by Jack King for his film The Ceremony. This year's prize also includes a bust of Sir Sean, made by artist Eric Goulder, with 10 feature-length world premieres in the running and audiences at the festival deciding the overall winner. It will also see the first fruits of the National Film and Television School Sean Connery Talent Lab which has allowed six young filmmakers to make their first short films."I didn't know what to do, or how to get into the industry," says Mairead Hamilton whose comedy horror Checkout is one of the six short films developed."And then I heard randomly, because I'm from the Isle of Skye, that a Gaelic TV series was being shot there.""I just reached out and I was like, Hey, I'll do anything. Can I be involved?"I was the runner on that show and then I became the trainee director, series director, and then ended up writing on the show as well."She adds: "Then I read about the Sean Connery Talent Lab. I'd had an idea for a short film for quite a few years, just bubbling away in my head and I hadn't yet put pen to paper and I thought this was an incredible opportunity to do so."Ryan Pollok says he's proud to have got a story from his home town of Wishaw on the big screen."Because very few films have been made in Wishaw," he says. "So this lab's good for getting people from different backgrounds and getting a chance to bring a proper crew and cast and a budgeted film to life."And it's good to get Wishaw on the big screen." As well as the two Connery Foundation funded strands, the festival is screening the six Bond films the Edinburgh-born actor made with Eon Productions starting with Dr No from 1962 (he later returned to play Bond in 1983 in Never Say Never Again).Although regarded by many as the greatest Bond of all, Jason says the film's producers weren't convinced at first."I remember talking to Barbara Broccoli and she said when dad came and auditioned, he had a swagger to him which they thought was interesting but he wasn't the Bond they were thinking of."Then Cubby Broccoli was watching as he left and dad was walking across the street, and the way he walked, dodging cars, and they said OK that's the guy."He obviously didn't know the Bond films were going to be this huge success. At the time Dr No was made, the film cost £900,000 and dad was paid £5,000. But he put himself in the way of that, made that leap, and that's where the opportunity is."The final film, Diamonds are Forever, also left a legacy in the form of the Scottish International Education Trust which Connery set up in 1971, using the million dollar fee he then, it has awarded grants to a wide range of projects dreamed up by composers and engineers, economists and political thinkers. The thing they have in common is that all need cash to make the next step in their professional lives. Sean Connery said that the most important moment in his own life was learning to read and his sons believe his legacy is giving young people that same week, Jason will unveil a plaque at an Edinburgh primary school which echoes that thought, and along with the legacy left at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, he believes his father is making the difference he hoped."They want to tell stories," he says. "They want to do commercial, entertaining, interesting films."And how lovely that these new young filmmakers are coming along and getting the chance to do so."These things are lovely for me as his son but more than that, I think they create a positive legacy of dad's life."
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
"Audacious, gripping, affecting and disturbing": The Mortician
Anyone doubting the vitality and importance of what we might call the cinema of opposition had only to glance at their news feed when the Academy Awards and the Palme d'Or were handed out. In March, a documentary about life under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank won the Oscar for Best Documentary, while in May veteran Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi won big at Cannes with the regime-baiting It Was Just An Accident. Over the decades Panahi has regularly been imprisoned and harassed, though he continues undeterred. During one bout of house arrest he shot a documentary and smuggled it to Cannes on a flash drive hidden in a cake. True to form, It Was Just An Accident was shot in Iran in secret and without permissions. His travails put funding rejections from Screen Scotland into perspective. Happily, this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is platforming similarly challenging works. There's a screening of Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk, Sepideh Farsi's documentary about 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, killed along with 10 relatives in an Israeli airstrike in April. Meanwhile, in the EIFF's competition strand, there's a welcome return for Canada-based Iranian exile Abdolreza Kahani, whose film A Shrine screened at last year's festival where it drew much praise. Filmed and set mostly in a bleak, snow-bound Montreal but with all dialogue in Persian, The Mortician follows Iranian expat Mojtaba (Nima Sadr) in his job washing the bodies of the deceased in accordance with Islamic tradition. It seems to be a semi-official sinecure, paid for by the Iranian state from an near-empty office run by a stern official with a military bearing. Mojtaba, in contrast, is saggy, baggy and looks eternally perplexed, shuffling from job to job to make the money he sends home to help his eight siblings and their disabled father. Most clients are dead, obviously, though not all. One wants to be washed alive – he thinks it will cure his insomnia – but finds the process too ticklish. Another, a woman, wants her party-loving daughter to practice so she can wash her grandmother when she dies and by doing so absorb some of the old woman's virtue. Read More And then there's Jana (Gola, an Iran-born singer and actress now based in London). An exiled singer of protest songs which are fiercely critical of the Iranian regime, she contacts Mojtaba with a most curious request. It takes him into her secluded rural home and into her life, and sees him partner her in a dangerous project. 'How many more songs are needed for change?' she asks him. 'Something bigger has to happen.' In a sense, The Mortician is a portrait of a diaspora, but one in which paranoia runs deep. Nobody trusts anybody Jana most of all. 'Delete all your apps,' she tells Mojtaba before his first visit. Elsewhere Kahani turns that feeling into visual motifs: misted-up windows and mirrors, reflections, close-ups of smartphone screens. These all hint at surveillance and scrutiny. As we will learn, the suspicions are not misplaced. Virtually all the music is diagetic – there is no soundtrack – and Kahani's style is avowedly, almost religiously naturalistic, all of which adds oomph to the film's abrupt, shocking ending. That feeling is rendered even more powerful by what follows: a coup de théâtre the director unveils just when you expect the credits to roll. Uh-uh, he says, instead delivering a sort of written manifesto in which he thanks himself for refusing funding from the Iranian state and explains how he shot the film entirely alone, on a smartphone, in an urgent need to make what he calls 'solo cinema'. 'If I have a phone and a mic, I'm ready,' he states. And how. Audacious, gripping, affecting and disturbing, The Mortician is a bold call to arms from a film-maker who is as defiant as he is resourceful. The Mortician screens as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, August 17-18
The Herald Scotland
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Eva Victor's film debut Sorry, Baby is a slow-burn treat
Four stars Following last year's handing of the opening night honours to a home-grown film – The Outrun, set and filmed mostly in Orkney – the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) turns for this year's curtain raiser to another story in which a young woman works through and deals with trauma and emotional turmoil. This time, though, we're in the north-east corner of the United States. Sorry, Baby is written and directed by actor and comedian Eva Victor in their feature debut. They also star as Agnes, recently appointed professor of English Literature at an unnamed university in a small, leafy town. Victor wrote the script in Maine and the film was shot over three weeks in Massachusetts, two states which are home to multiple private liberal arts colleges in multiple picturesque locations. Let's assume we're in one of them, close to a beach and a lighthouse (it features, a Virginia Woolf reference). We open on a chapter heading – The Year Of The Baby – and the arrival for a weekend stay of Agnes's former housemate, Lydie (British actress Naomi Ackie). Given that introduction, the news that Lydie is pregnant doesn't come as a surprise. But what starts like a mash-up of Alex Ross Perry's Queen Of Earth (gilded New Yorkers Elizabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston falling apart in a weekend cabin up-state) and pretty much anything by Whit Stillman or Greta Gerwig fast becomes its own thing as Victor draws us through Agnes's story by means of further chapter headings introducing flashbacks to her and Lydie's time as graduate students. The Year Of The Sandwich, for instance and, crucially, The Year Of The Bad Thing. Read more Barry Didcock The Bad Thing is a sexual assault by Agnes's PhD supervisor Preston Decker (the preternaturally creepy Louis Cancelmi). It's neatly and innovatively done through a series of static external shots of Decker's house. Agnes goes in, to discuss her thesis she thinks. The afternoon light fades, night comes on, a shaken-looking Agnes re-appears and stumbles to her car. Then an intense journey home, shot from a dashboard mounted camera. We only learn what has happened when Agnes tells Lydie in detail later, the camera hardly leaving her face as she squats in a bath. This decision not to show the assault (or is it a refusal?) but to concentrate instead on the aftermath, the fallout, the responses (from men and women) and the coping mechanisms required has seen respected film journal Sight & Sound fold Victor into a movement it's calling The New Reticence. Identified fellow travellers include American pair India Donaldson and Eliza Hittman, and Australian Kitty Green, who made acclaimed #MeToo drama The Assistant. It isn't a snappy label, though that's not the point. But into the mix Victor throws an element which should unbalance the film but somehow doesn't: humour. Agnes can't resist quips and one-liners, even when the circumstances seem inappropriate, even when the subject is awful. Meanwhile Victor-as-director is happy to throw their character into comic situations. It's laugh out loud funny at points. In the hands of another film-maker that inciting incident – the assault – would be used to provide propulsion and generate anger. Instead, Victor deploys a deliberately languid pacing in keeping with the overall indie feel. Not all the male characters are awful, either. Agnes meets a kindly sandwich shop owner during an anxiety attack (John Carroll Lynch) and falls into a sexual relationship with sweet and totally unthreatening neighbour Gavin (a welcome turn by Lucas Hedges). So perhaps we should add nuance, subtlety and complexity to Victor's implied reticence. These are strong foundation and bode well for the future. An under-stated opener for the EIFF then, to be sure. But Eva Victor's debut is a slow-burn treat which still packs a punch – even as it poses questions with no easy answers. Sorry, Baby screen as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival on Friday August 15. It is released in the UK on August 22 For tickets for Edinburgh Festival shows, click here
