Embrace the chaos: festival director Paul Ridd on the 78th Edinburgh International Film Festival
During his final preparations for this year’s Edinburgh Intermational Film Festival, festival director Paul Ridd joined us to talk about his new guiding principles for the programme and makes some recommendations from the line-up.
Edinburgh International Film Festival’s team are in the middle of the final sprint to make sure everything is in place for the event kicking off on 14 August. Despite the intense activity, festival director Paul Ridd seems relaxed ahead of his second festival in charge. “I’ve got a great, supportive team around me,” he says, “and we learned so much from last year in terms of the shape of the festival in the months leading up to it, and then we learned even more on the ground just by doing last year’s event, which we like to call our Year Zero.” That makes this upcoming festival, the 78th edition, Year One.
It’s no wonder Ridd wanted his tenure to feel like a fresh start. This once venerable festival seemed to have lost its way in recent years, and was almost lost completely in 2022 when its parent company, the Centre for the Moving Image, went into administration. EIFF was resurrected with new financing from Screen Scotland, and veteran producer Andrew Macdonald was installed as chair of the new organisation in the summer of 2023. Ridd joined as festival director and CEO shortly thereafter.
Ridd’s predecessor, Kristy Matheson, had already returned EIFF to its traditional slot in August among the plethora of other festivals taking place in the Scottish capital (from 2008 to 2021 it was held in June), but Ridd says one of his guiding principles when he took over was to embrace the August chaos. “The idea was to lean into the Fringe and understand that it’s where you make great discoveries.”
This sense of discovery is most evoked in The Sean Connery Prize, EIFF’s new competition sponsored by the late Scottish actor’s estate. Ten features compete this year. All are world premieres, and most are from first-time filmmakers, although there are a few notable exceptions, such as the much-anticipated second features from Campbell X (Low Rider) and Helen Walsh (On the Sea). The winner, voted for by audiences, will take home a £50,000 cash prize.
Ridd reckons this competition is one of the festival’s major new selling points. “It’s been a strategic decision to make sure we’re offering audiences and the industry something fresh,” he says. “The opportunity to see films that have not played anywhere else in the world, that’s a big bonus for film critics, but also for buyers coming here and seeing films that are competing for a very meaningful financial reward that’s also voted for by audiences, which is a big boost to the audience-friendly nature of the films.”
This is not to suggest EIFF is now only a festival of discovery. The programme also features world premieres from more established talent like Ben Wheatley, whose Bulk opens the festival’s Midnight Madness strand dedicated to genre cinema. There’s also highlights from festivals like Berlin (Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands), Cannes (Dominik Moll’s Case 137) and Sundance (Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, which opens proceedings) among the 43 new feature films in the programme. And the number of in-person conversations has increased this year, with on-stage chats with the likes of Andrea Arnold, Ken Loach and Jeremy Thomas among the highlights. “The fact that we’ve got audiences and industry interacting with these major figures is a big part of what we’re trying to achieve,” says Ridd. “That’s what makes festivals special. So, for sure, we’ve been trying to build an in-person element into everything we’re doing.”
The consensus, judging from enthusiastic reports in the trades last year, seems to be that Ridd and his team have moved the festival in the right direction and made it a much more appealing destination for the key players in the British film industry. The local industry in Scotland seems more circumspect, however. One point of contention has been the paucity of Scotland-based programmers on the team. The festival’s three short film programmers are based in London, and a recent report by a BBC commentator claimed there’s only one Scot on EIFF’s 25-strong submissions team.
When I put this criticism to Ridd, he claims that the reporting was inaccurate, and he underplays the significance of the submissions viewers’ make-up. “Ultimately our core team – so myself and my festival producer, Emma Boa, everybody who works in marketing and on the operational side of things – we’re based in Scotland, and we have an international perspective in our viewing pool, which I think is vital to securing a real depth and range of films in the programme.”
I do press Ridd several times on how many submissions viewers are based north of the border, but he refuses to reveal the actual number. The only Scottish programmer whose name I recognise from the whole programme is Lynda Myles, the pioneering artistic director of the festival in the 1970s, who’s presenting a personal pick, Lucio Castro’s After This Death. Her inclusion does beg the question, though: where will the next Lynda Myles come from if so few Scottish-based programmers are involved in the country’s most prestigious film festival?
Ridd is on much happier ground when discussing his wide-ranging programme. He gives a shout-out to Simon Rumley’s thriller Crushed. “Simon is a very experienced genre filmmaker who’s made a lot of brilliant, low-budget work, but this one, if you go in completely blind, is a genuine experience. It’s not for the faint of heart, but the craft and the sheer quality of Simon’s filmmaking shine through.”
Genre cinema is well represented throughout, and Ridd seems particularly passionate about the Midnight Madness strand, which, as the name suggests, sees films screen at the witching hour. “It’s such a vibrant time to watch a film, and it’s such an exciting space to experience those films for the first time. But I’m genre agnostic; I like the idea of mixing it up.” As if to demonstrate this catholic taste, he also recommends two very different works. “There’s a beautiful family film called Grow by John McPhail that will be a great crowd-pleaser, I think. And then there’s Andrew Kötting’s The Memory Blocks, which is an experimental film about his daughter, which I love; it’s just such a beautiful piece of work.”
Look out too for social-realist thriller Dragonfly from Paul Andrew Williams, who knocked EIFF’s audiences off their feet with his debut London to Brighton in 2006. I ask Ridd if any debuting director in this year’s lineup could have a similar breakout? He doesn’t miss a beat in suggesting Harry Sherriff, whose twisted comedy thriller Misper plays out of competition, as an exciting prospect. “[Misper] blew us away. It’s a very low-budget piece, but the tone of it, the style, and its story, it’s just so unpredictable. I think it’s a film that might really emerge in a big way from this year’s programme.”
The 78th Edinburgh International Film Festival runs 14 to 20 August 2025.