EIFF 2000: Day 10

What A Surprise

by Trinity

One of the great traditions of the Edinburgh Film Festival is its Surprise Movie. Each year hundreds of people put their faith in the Festival's Director and buy tickets for a film they know nothing about. It is said that only the Director and the Projectionist know the identity of the film, but that doesn't prevent a lot of guessing going on. This year, a competition was held to see if anyone could work it out.

My own network of informants were rather slow in getting any information to me this year, and it was only a mere fifteen minutes before the screening when a I got the following cryptic tip-off: "At least it's not 10 reels like the last one".

The event was held in two screens at the UGC cinema, which made the atmosphere even more electric - would either screen get to see the film first, even by a split second? In the end, only three people at the screening got the correct answer. It certainly was a good choice for the surprise movie - not quite as impressive as LA Confidential which was shown four years ago but a lot better than last year's Analyse This.

And the mystery movie was... Hamlet.

Hope you managed to guess correctly!

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