Festival Cinema [11/08/96]

1996-08-11
45m

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

Presenter Dougie Vipond takes ITV audiences on a whistle-stop tour of the 1996 Edinburgh International Film Festival, the world's oldest continually running film festival. Mark Cousins, filmmaker and festival director 1996-97, walks us through his programme highlights, including a selection of films from 1947, the year the festival began. He also dives into the non-fiction offering, with documentaries about filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein plus a new film about Scottish actor Eric Campbell and his partnership with Charlie Chaplin.

Aardman Animations co-founder David Sproxton is interviewed ahead of a festival focus on the studio and discusses the mechanics of the puppets, Aardman’s distinctive animation style and their approach to storytelling, character and visual humour. The programme also includes interviews and features on other titles premiering at the festival, such as director Caroline Paterson and actor Robert Carlyle discussing their short film The Lucky Suit.

First of three previews from the 50th Edinburgh Film 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.