Independent Film in Close-Up

A seat at the 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival

In the lobby of the Edinburgh Cineworld, as I doomscroll and wait for my 6:30pm screening, a twenty-something man several feet away stares down at a teal-and-orange poster splayed in his hands. The Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for Short Filmmaking Excellence, its heading reads, below which are ten short films each labelled with the little caption: World Premiere. In four days, one of those films will win the £15,000 to ensure it won’t be its filmmakers’ last. If he flipped the poster over, he would see the ten films in the feature-length competition, the Sean Connery Prize, that one for £50,000. But he doesn’t flip it over; he isn’t there yet.

Beside him, a woman of similar age timidly scans the lobby. She notices me, hesitates, turns away, scans again, glances back, makes eye contact, and finally walks over.

“Pardon me,” she says with a mild Eastern European accent, “but would you mind taking our photo?” She holds out her phone.

I oblige, and she ushers herself and her companion onto the thin red carpet adhered with red duct tape along one of the lobby walls. Behind it, a black step-and-repeat backdrop displays the words “79th Edinburgh International Film Festival,” interspersed among a collage of the festival’s industry sponsors. The two tense and smile; the man holds up his poster and points with his other hand to one of the ten boxes. I do my best to square them up and take four or five to give them some options. Not professional grade, but I like to think they’re not bad.

“Now one without the poster,” the man says (same accent), tucking his poster-clutching arm behind his back. I take a few more before lowering the phone. Everyone exhales, and they step off the carpet, perhaps afraid to overstay their welcome.

“Do you guys have a short in competition?” I ask as the woman takes her phone back. By now, I’ve recognised them from the Q&A after yesterday’s screening at Filmhouse, where I sat with a packed and bubbling audience of mostly young people for three hours, watching all ten competition shorts one after another with no intermission. To decide the winner, everyone was given a paper ballot with which to rank each film from one to five by tearing at the dotted lines. A coda of surreptitious ripping accompanied the end credits of each film. One of the shorts, a documentary titled Finding Home at the Pianodrome, followed a community of craftspeople and musicians who restore and upcycle disused pianos in Edinburgh. When the final short ended and the lights returned, I noticed one of its cast members sitting three seats to my right. The woman beside me was with him; she’d given most of the other films low ratings.

Back on the Cineworld’s glossy tiles, the two smile timidly at my question, as though still unsure what face to make in this scenario. “Yes,” the woman says, “it is Surplace?”

“I saw it yesterday,” I say, “I really enjoyed it.” It is, oddly, the same tone I would use to thank an ageing veteran for their service — the kind you know will never convey everything you wish it might. They smile, thank me, and shuffle away, their final screening over and their big day complete.

A perfect ending would see their film go on to win the competition, after which my amateur handiwork would wind up on some Lithuanian film website, but not every dream comes true.

Earlier that day at Central Hall, the first-ever UK Film Conference commences with a conversation between Picturehouse Creative Director Claire Binns and BFI CEO Ben Roberts. The atmosphere is palpably coarse.

“Lots of people have come up to me and said, ‘Give Ben a hard time.’” Binns says to open the discussion. She’s referring to money, specifically the National Lottery Good Cause funds, a public fund directed by the BFI that, among other functions, supports a finite number of independent productions. Early into the discussion, Binns asks everyone who works in film to raise their hand: a majority of the audience.

“So I would imagine some of you have been turned down,” she says.

“Including you,” Roberts retorts.

Binns goes on to break down the BFI’s financial plan for its £150 million three-year budget, scrutinising the percentages and the institute’s involvement in everything from promoting cinema attendance to managing the world’s largest film archive. Roberts spends most of the ninety minutes playing defense, justifying the BFI’s many avenues of investment, or everything it funds instead of the unsuccessful applicants in the room.

While Binns and Roberts debate the BFI’s bookkeeping, two pairs of elephants loom in the rafters. Everyone can smell them. On one side are Obsession and Backrooms, early summer’s breakout sensations that seem to prove independent filmmaking is alive and well (albeit possibly dependent on new media for its oxygen). On the other, there are August’s big-budget behemoths Binns calls out by name (“It’s really hard when you’ve got [The] Odyssey and Spider-Man [Brand New Day] in a twelve-screen cinema and twelve screens are playing those two films”). The dream is still alive, it seems, but not without the same oppressive forces as always, drowning out most newcomers in oceans of commercial cash.

The night prior, I sit down for my final screening of the day at Cineworld in the centre of my row. The row in front of me is marked “Reserved”. With the exception of a few who miss the sign and are politely informed of their mistake, the row fills with a group of all ages who greet each other with warm enthusiasm, handing each other popcorn and spare bottles of water. Taking their seats, they lean forward and eagerly raise their eyebrows at each other. One of them keeps the seat in front of me open.

The lights dim, and someone from the festival comes out to introduce the film. A few people in the row ahead record from their phones as she delivers soaring praise of what we’re about to see before welcoming the film’s director to the stage. The quarter-capacity audience applauds, and the row before me cheers. It’s his sophomore feature, so the film isn’t among those up for the fifty grand (which would go to Skintown, a funny and arresting story of two young men’s risky venture to escape a narrow life in Northern Ireland amid the Troubles), but that’s on no one’s mind. He says little, thanking the audience so much for coming, what an honour and a joy it is to be part of this festival, all the hard work done by so many people to make this happen, how much this film means to him. As the audience applauds, he hands back the microphone, walks up the steps, and takes his seat directly in front of me. Along the row, people lean forward to smile, reach out a hand, and give him a thumbs-up.

Images courtesy of the Edinburgh International Film Festival