Edinburgh Film Festival: New Campaign Launched To Save Long-Running Festival & Filmhouse Cinemas

Zac Ntim
·4 min read
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Images from classic and contemporary films were beamed onto some of Edinburgh’s most famous locations Monday evening as part of a growing campaign to save the city’s Filmhouse cinema and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, one of the world’s longest continuously running film festivals.

In October, the trustees in charge of the Centre for the Moving Image (CMI), the charity which runs the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh, and Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen, appointed administrators.

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A statement from the CMI said a “perfect storm” of rising costs and falling admissions numbers due to the pandemic had been exacerbated by the current cost of living crisis. All three institutions ceased trading immediately.

Since then, a local campaign titled Save The Filmhouse comprised of former Filmhouse employees, filmmakers, and patrons has ballooned into a larger movement with a petition to save the organizations attracting more than 23,000 signatures.

Last night’s projections, the latest stage in the campaign, were orchestrated by long-time Edinburgh resident and filmmaker Mark Cousins (Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema) who told Deadline that he was attempting to “keep the flame” of cinema alive as the city’s institutions face serious challenges.

“There are various things to do: strategic work and lobbying. But I think with everything there should be creative solutions,” Cousins said. “So as a filmmaker and a film lover, I decided to project vast images of cinema in the iconic bits of Edinburgh to keep the flame alive and show how much we the people who use Filmhouse and the Edinburgh Film Festival miss it.”

The collection of images beamed onto sites across the city included the triptych poster from Barry Jenkin’s 2016 best picture winner Moonlight, which was shared on social media by Cousins, and stills from classic Hollywood flicks like The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life, which Cousins said provided the backdrop to share uniquely cinematic messages of solidarity with the local community.

“I chose a moment from It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, because it’s a film that asks the question: What would happen to your community if you didn’t exist?” Cousins said. “So there’s a nice little thing there of what will happen to our city of Edinburgh and our country of Scotland if the Filmhouse and the film festival don’t exist?”

The projections were accompanied by messages such as “A Cinema is the Heart of a City” and “Love Filmhouse and Edinburgh Film Festival.”

Staff members working at the Edinburgh Film Festival and both Filmhouse sites have been made redundant. The Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said her government would engage with Edinburgh city councils and Creative Scotland to consider whether “there is any support” that can be provided to the CMI after news of the administration broke.

Campaigners in the city are now focused on working with both local government and central organizations like Creative Scotland to find a way for the festival and Filmhouse to return in some form.

“The Filmhouse building is being sold, it will go on the market in the next few weeks,” Cousins said. “Once the building is sold, it will clear some of the debts. And therefore I hope a new business model will emerge where these two organizations can come back in some kind of new guise.”

The financial collapse of the CMI came just weeks after the Edinburgh film festival celebrated its 75th anniversary. Screenings included Charlotte Wells’s A24 feature Aftersun and Juniper, starring Charlotte Rampling. This was also the first festival under the new leadership of Creative Director Kristy Matheson who joined after leaving her role as Director of Film at Australia’s national museum of screen culture.

The CMI had previously unveiled an ambitious $65M re-development plan to create a new home for the festival, including six new cinema screens with 4K digital, 16mm, 35mm, and 70mm projection capabilities.

“There’s a bigger story here that in any city across the world that has a cinema trying to do cultural work, that city, that place needs to own it and feel the ownership of it,” Cousins added. “These organizations need to be for the city, but also of the city.”

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