THE Edge of Love and in particular the presence of Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller has given the first June Edinburgh International Film Festival a spring in its step.
The film's director, John Maybury, is a big Edinburgh fan. His film Love is the Devil, based on the life of the British artist Francis Bacon, won the festival's major trophy, the Michael Powell Award, ten years ago.
He called it "one of the best f
estivals in the world… a real film festival about cinema, about film-making, not about commerce".
It's interesting to note, however, that the opening night gala film came to Edinburgh by luck rather than design.
Maybury described how the film was rejected for three possible categories in the Cannes Film Festival, calling it "extremely disappointing".
"We are all chuffed to bits to be here. I'm really glad the French didn't take it for Cannes," he joked to loud laughter at the film's press conference.
Later he added the French festival, for all its lustre, was partly a "hideous trade fair".
Scrumming it THE opening-night party of the festival was a generous bash, spread across three floors with several secluded bars and a dance hall, in the deliciously labyrinthine Teviot Row House in Bristo Square.
The place is better known as the Gilded Balloon during the Fringe, when the whole area is teeming with people and productions.
Like the opening night premiere, the festival party was a cut above previous years, with classy beer, and fish and chips served in pretend newspaper. Dylan Thomas readings and songs from The Edge of Love were on the bill.
To shatter any illusions, however, there were no celebrities to be seen. Sienna Miller et al had their own room in the basement, to which you could only gain access with a curious pink bracelet. They emerged only to go to the loo (with the tabloid press in hot pursuit).
Staff were warned not to sneak pictures on their mobile phones.
Given the media scrum that converged to catch Miller and Keira Knightley on the red carpet, however, the heavy security was arguably quite a good thing. The rest of us had to make do with charming, and arguably more entertaining local celebrities, such as film-maker Mark Cousins, fresh off the plane from Iraq in a war-torn kilt, or the painter, Alison Watt, a recent television star.
Slip? A wee yinTHIS diary claimed last week, somewhat bizarrely, that Billy Connolly was shown on the short film for the book festival launch. He wasn't, and apologies. Fingers slipped after a long literary launch.
Off the WallTHE Wackness bills itself as "one of the coolest films of the summer", and producers show a flair for promotion.
Ahead of its European premiere tonight, they are erecting a three-metre-high graffiti wall in the middle of Festival Square, and inviting people to help spray-paint the film's poster.
Set in New York of the 1990s and "pulsing with hip-hop", The Wackness features Josh Peck as small-time college boy drug dealer and Ben Kingsley as his therapist. (See review, page 4.)
Tribute to RickyTHE irrepressible Ricky Demarco, 77, is starring in a new film but will not be walking the red carpet at the festival. "Art is not about money," Demarco declares, in a new documentary film by Bafta award-winning director Samir Mehanovic.
Richard and I is a feature- length film described as Mehanovic's tribute to his mentor, and it will be screened at The Scotsman Hotel in late July.
Demarco brought the Bosnian film-maker to Edinburgh in 1995, arguably saving him from a bomb that killed 71 people in his home town.
"The film shows the young bullish Demarco and his equally gung-ho older self," says the announcement, "still eulogising, waxing lyrical and, some might say, raving about the beauty and benefits of art."
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