Andrea Riseborough, Peter Dinklage, Renée Zellweger and – inevitably – the late Sean Connery will be among the big names on show at the Edinburgh international film festival, which announced its programme today.
A clutch of world premieres at the festival includes a remake of trash classic The Toxic Avenger, starring Dinklage alongside Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood and Julia Davis, while Riseborough appears opposite Brenda Blethyn in Paul Andrew Williams’s Tribeca festival hit Dragonfly. Zellweger appears in a behind-the-scenes role, with the world premiere of her directorial debut, an animated short film called They. And in what appears something of a coup, the festival will screen 4K restorations of Connery’s six “official” James Bond films: Dr No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever.
Connery’s name is now firmly imprinted on the festival, with its main feature-film prize named after him and screenings of short films developed through the Sean Connery Talent Lab, an offshoot of the actor’s foundation and the National Film and Television School Scotland. Festival director and CEO Paul Ridd said: “The legacy of Scotland’s biggest global star is central to what we’re trying to do, connecting it with the future generation of film talent and all the philanthropic work the Connery Foundation do across film and various other causes is of vital importance to us. To have access to those six wonderful James Bond films and showing them on the big screen is very special.”
The 2025 edition marks the third event since the dramatic collapse of the Centre of the Moving Image, the festival’s then parent organisation, in October 2022, which also resulted in the closure of Edinburgh’s celebrated Filmhouse cinema and its sister cinema in Aberdeen. Helped by the wider international festival that takes over the city every August, a short-notice scratch event was put together for the summer of 2023, while Ridd was installed as the head of a new organisation for 2024, which returned the festival to something comparable to its former status. And in a piece of good news for both the festival and the city itself, the Filmhouse in Edinburgh reopened in June after a high-profile campaign.
Ridd says the festival is looking to consolidate its revival. “We are thinking about this as year one with last year being year zero. We were really pleased with what we brought together last year, so for 2025 we are looking at what worked previously and not deviating really away from that. What’s different, I guess, this year is that we’ve had a significantly higher volume of submissions sent to us, which is fantastic.”
This year the festival’s competition (for the “Sean Connery prize for feature film-making excellence”) comprises 10 world premieres, including Campbell X’s “queer road movie” Low Rider, Swedish documentary Once You Shall Be One of Those Who Lived Long Ago about a physically collapsing mining town, and In Transit, a drama about an artist and her model starring Jennifer Ehle. An Out of Competition section includes high-profile films such as the Dardenne brothers’ Young Mothers, a study of a centre for pregnant teenagers, Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands, with Sam Riley as a washed-up tennis coach, and The Memory Blocks, a new film from experimental documentary-maker Andrew Kötting.
The festival is also leaning into a resurgence of interest in archive and back catalogue films; alongside a retrospective of westerns by famed genre director Budd Boetticher (including 1957 classic The Tall T), Edinburgh is staging a series of screenings of films nominated by their in-person guests, all of whom will introduce their picks as well as taking part in an In Conversation event. The Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald, who will appear alongside his brother, Trainspotting producer Andrew Macdonald, has chosen Soviet war classic The Cranes Are Flying; Candyman’s Nia DaCosta will talk about Doug Liman’s 90s drug deal comedy thriller Go; and Ben Wheatley, whose new film Bulk is leading the festival’s Midnight Madness strand, has gone for Ealing comedy classic The Man in the White Suit.
Equally as important as the programme was the decision to move the festival back to its August time slot, having been shifted to June in 2008 as a strategic decision by the UK Film Council, then in charge of industry policy, as a way of giving space between the Edinburgh and London film festivals (with the latter taking place in early October). This has reunited the film festival with the energy of the international and fringe festivals, as well as potentially adding some purchase in the autumn awards season. Ridd says: “I’m very conscious that August is a strategic position for a lot of film distributors to launch their films going into that awards period. So I think August is a pure positive for us.”
He adds: “This is a beautiful city, and you’ve got all of this other art going on all around you. It’s a unique feeling and I know what a big opportunity that represents to us, to emulate that spirit of discovery.”
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Ridd says he is particularly pleased with the reopening of the Filmhouse, even if the umbilical connection between the festival and venue is no longer there. “We’re a completely new organisation, which has emerged Phoenix-like from a difficult situation. But it’s obviously had a significant impact on the city, and I think everyone’s very, very excited to see it back.”
The Edinburgh international film festival, which previously announced Sundance hit Sorry, Baby and Irvine Welsh documentary Reality Is Not Enough as its opening and closing films, runs from 14-20 August.
