Ed Film Fest at Home, an online festival of the best new cinema for you to enjoy at home, opens today to the audiences worldwide! Presented by Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) and Curzon Home Cinema (CHC), this ambitious project features a selection of the best future film releases. A brand-new film will be presented each day of the 12-day festival, with films playing for between 2 and 12 days, each priced at £9.99.
As previously announced, the ambitious programme also features such acclaimed titles as Clemency, directed by Chinonye Chukwu and featuring Alfre Woodard, Last and First Men with Tilda Swinton, Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise and the latest film from the Dardenne brothers, Young Ahmed.
In addition to the Q&A with Thomas Clay, the director of Fanny Lye Deliver’d and its cast (Maxine Peake, Charles Dance, Tanya Reynold, Freddie Fox) on Monday, 29 June at 8.30pm, EIFF and CHC are also pleased to confirm further Q&As with cast and creatives of some of the other titles in the programme. These include:
Friday, 26 June at 8.00pm
Q&A with White Riot director Rubika Shah and also Julien Temple, Billy Bragg and Pervez Bilgrami (1970s punk band Alien Kulture). The Q&A is a celebration of Glastonbury’s 50th Bash in collaboration with the Cineramageddon Film Programme and in the spirit of the Left Field Tent.
Saturday, 27 June at 4pm
Masterclass and a Q&A with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, directors of Young Ahmed.
Sunday, 28 June at 8.30pm
Q&A with the director of A White, White Day, Hlynur Palmason.
All Q&As will be hosted live on EIFF’s Facebook, YouTube and Twitter channels, and once finished they will be uploaded to the Festival’s YouTube channel. Audiences will have an opportunity to submit their questions during the live sessions on their preferred platform by using #EdFilmFestatHome or tagging @edfilmfest.
EIFF prides itself on being accessible to all and the Festival is very pleased to announce Pay It Forward, a new scheme ensuring that everyone has access to brilliant cinema and the education and learning benefits it creates, without financial barriers standing in the way.
Thanks to this scheme, Ed Film Fest at Home audience members will have the opportunity to gift a ticket alongside their own purchase. For every Pay It Forward ticket purchased, EIFF will match it. More information on Pay It Forward scheme in Notes to editors.
Full line-up for EDFILMFEST AT HOME includes:
CLEMENCY (24 June – 5 July) written and directed by Chinonye Chukwu and starring Alfre Woodard. This award-winning feature focuses on a prison warden Bernadine Williams who confronts the psychological and emotional demons her job creates, ultimately connecting her to the man she is now sanctioned to kill. Chinonye first had the idea for Clemency after Troy Davis’ execution in a state prison in 2011 and spent 4 years researching for the film.
FANNY LYE DELIVER’D (24 June – 5 July) with a live Q&A on Monday, 29 June at 8.30pm. Directed by Thomas Clay and starring Maxine Peake, Charles Dance, Freddie Fox and Tanya Reynolds. Set in Shropshire in 1657, this folk horror/thriller concerns a young woman living a remote, rural, puritan existence with her older husband and young son, until the arrival of a young couple on the run who introduce Fanny Lye to a world of possibilities…
ANTHROPOCENE: THE HUMAN EPOCH (25 June – 5 July) directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicolas de Pencier, narrated by Alicia Vikander. This stunning documentary, filmed in 20 countries across 6 continents, documents the impact the human race has had on Planet Earth to illuminate the question: have we entered a new geological epoch?
SAINT FRANCES (25 – 27 June) directed by Alex Thompson and written by and starring Kelly O’Sullivan. The UK premiere of this US comedy drama which sees Bridget, 34, aimless and accidentally pregnant, decide to have an abortion. Needing a job, she gets one (by luck rather than design) she’s not really very well suited to – that of nanny, to the precocious Frances.
YOUNG AHMED (25 June – 2 July) with a live Q&A and masterclass on Saturday, 27 June at 4pm. Directed and written by Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. After taking to heart an extremist interpretation of the Qu’ran, a Belgian teenager hatches a plan to kill his teacher.
VOLCANO (26 June – 5 July) directed by Roman Bondarchuk. Lukas, a translator working for the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) gets stranded in the middle of nowhere in southern Ukraine. Life, and the people, are nothing like Lukas has ever imagined before, and getting out of there is his only priority. But warming to his strange new hosts, perhaps there’s more going on here than first meets the eye.
A WHITE, WHITE DAY (27 – 29 June) with a live Q&A on Sunday, 28 June at 8.30pm. Directed by Hlynur Palmason and starring Ingvar Sigurdsson. Icelandic drama about a recently retired policeman who becomes obsessed that his recently-deceased wife was having an affair. His growing obsession starts to threaten the well-being of the rest of his family.
THE TRAITOR (28 June – 5 July) directed by Marco Bellocchio and starring Pierfrancesco Favino. A masterful telling of the real-life story of Tommaso Buscetta, the main informant in the ‘Maxi’ (Sicilian Mafia) Trial in Palermo in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
REBUILDING PARADISE (29 June – 5 July) directed by Ron Howard. The UK premiere of the moving documentary, by Hollywood director Ron Howard, that chronicles the post-fire lives of the residents of Paradise, California, which was 95% razed to the ground by the so-called ‘Camp Fire’ of November 2018.
WHITE RIOT (29 June – 5 July) with a live Q&A on Friday, 26 June at 8.00pm. Rubika Shah’s energising film charts a London protest movement in 1976. The campaign grew from Hoxton fanzine roots to 1978’s huge carnival in Victoria Park, featuring X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse and of course The Clash, whose rock star charisma and gale-force conviction took RAR’s message to the masses.
PERFUMES (LES PARFUMS) (1 – 2 July) directed by Grégory Magne, starring Emmanuelle Devos, Gustave Kervern, Sergi Lopez, Grégory Montel. The UK premiere of this French comedy drama set in the ‘nose’ (nez) business. A once-famous ‘nez’ (in the perfume world) sells her extraordinary olfactory facility to any company that’s prepared to pay for it. She’s a selfish diva, but one that might just have a shot at redemption through her relationship with her new chauffeur, a man with many troubles of his own.
CAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY (3 – 5 July) directed by Justin Pemberton and based on the best-selling and one of the most powerful books of our time, written by French economist Thomas Piketty. This UK premiere is an eye-opening journey through wealth and power that breaks the popular assumption that the accumulation of capital runs hand in hand with social progress, shining a new light on the world around us and its growing inequalities.
LAST AND FIRST MEN (3 – 5 July) directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson and narrated by Tilda Swinton. The UK premiere of the late, great composer’s directorial debut, a stunning audio-visual, science-fiction essay on human mortality and the end of all things. Loosely based on the 1930 Olaf Stapledon novel of the same name, Tilda Swinton voices a human from its 18th distinct evolution from some two billion years in the future (the Last Men), reaching back to the First Men (us) for help, as the end of time approaches.
ED FILM FEST AT HOME runs 24 June – 5 July 2020
