Festival Cinema [18/08/96]

1996-08-18
45m

The second of three ITV programmes reporting on the 49th Edinburgh International Film Festival.

In his second ITV dispatch from the 1996 Edinburgh Film Festival, host Dougie Vipond interviews actor Ben Stiller ahead of the premiere of his new film Flirting With Disaster, and documentarian Nick Broomfield discusses his film Fetishes, which shines a light on the BDSM scene in New York. The programme also includes features and interviews on the Mirror Ball strand, the festival’s first spotlight on music videos, which includes a selection of films curated by record label Mo’ Wax and a focus on music video director Pedro Romhanyi, who directed promos for Blur, Manic Street Preachers and Pulp.

At the time of writing, the future of the Edinburgh International Film Festival is uncertain, despite it being the oldest continually running film festival in the world. This 1996 report, broadcast as the festival entered its 50th year, illustrates what a cultural cornerstone the event is for fans of cinema in Edinburgh, Scotland, the UK and internationally.

Television programme featuring previews and interviews about films shown at the 1996 Edinburgh Festival.

Edinburgh - Festival City

A taste of Edinburgh's extraordinary history as a centre for the arts.

The Edinburgh International Festival, founded in 1947, is one of the world's most celebrated cultural events, an annual feast of fine art, theatre, ballet, opera and more. Created to offer healing through the arts after long years of war, the festival brought a swell of excitement from the start. Immediately, eight uninvited theatre companies joined the festival, creating an alternative arts festival that was eventually termed the Edinburgh Fringe (where comedy would eventually become the dominant force). The international film festival, which sadly announced its closure in 2022, came into being in the same moment of artistic reformation. In this collection, we look at Edinburgh as a media, arts and culture centre, giving a taste of how these intersecting events conspired to make Edinburgh a global cultural hub.