Sean Connery's Edinburgh

Edinburgh
1982
Sound
29m

The screen legend conducts a personal tour of the great city that shaped him.

Who better to promote the great City of Edinburgh, "which seems to have been built as a film set", than one of its most famous sons, Sir Sean Connery? Sponsored by the City of Edinburgh District Council and aimed at increasing tourist trade, the film maps out the historic buildings, cultural highlights, scientific achievements and sporting events for which the Scottish capital is rightly famous.

Reference to the more infamous exploits of Burke and Hare add a hint of the dark gothic underworld which attracts so many tourists. Sir Sean also visits his birthplace in Fountainbridge, while the gentle meanderings of a horse-drawn milk cart refer to his origins. But the director can't resist the most obvious reference to Ian Fleming and his hero James Bond.

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.