EIFF announces new strands

Festival also brings in new competition section as it returns to August

by Amber Wilkinson

The Wandering Princess will screen as part of the Tanaka Kinuyo retrospective
The Wandering Princess will screen as part of the Tanaka Kinuyo retrospective Photo: Courtesy of EIFF
The Edinburgh International Film Festival has announced it will have five new strands for this year's 75th edition - the first under the guidance of creative director Kristy Matheson and the first time that the festival will be held in August since it moved to June in 2008.

This year's festival will run from August 12 to 20, closing with After Yang, and films will be listed in sections entitled Night Moves, The Conversation, Heartbreakers, The Chamber and Postcards From The Edge. There will also be a revamped competition section, The Powell and Pressburger Award for Best Feature Film - which will replace the Michael Powell Award for best British feature.

The full festival programme of 125 features , documentaries, animations, experimental films and shorts, will be announced on July 22. The programme of 90 new feature films is structured across five strands with 10 films in competition as part of the new Powell and Pressburger Award.

In addition to celebrating 50 years since the Women’s Film Festival, EIFF’s ground-breaking global film event in 1972, there will be two major retrospectives: Social Studies: Six Films by Tanaka Kinuyo on the Japanese actor turned director and a thematic season Reframing the Gaze: Experiments in Women’s Filmmaking, 1972 to Now curated by Kim Knowles.

FREE curated programme of outdoor screenings of films in St Andrew Square for ‘Film Fest in the City’ over the opening weekend from 12th to 14th August, including a takeover day by EIFF Young programmers and a celebration of Scotland’s Stories on Screen supported by EventScotland as part of the Year of Stories 2022.

New cinema footprint for the festival running West to East (Cameo Picturehouse, Filmhouse, St Andrew Square, Vue Omni Edinburgh and the new Everyman Edinburgh in St James Quarter.

EIFF Talent Lab returns to give practical support to 30 scriptwriters, directors or producers working on their first feature film. EIFF’s Script Starter programme also support eight new scriptwriters and seven new programmers will participate in the EIFF & Curate It Fellowship.

A weekend of free screenings will also take place in St Andrew's Square during the festival's opening weekend.

Films included in the Kinuyo retrospective are:

Love Letter (Koibumi), a star-studded tale of love and social dislocation

The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu), a bright comedy about love and family

Forever a Woman (Chibusa yo eien nare), a bold examination of female desire and agency

The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ohi), Tanaka’s lavish historical epic, starring Kyô Machiko (Rashomon)

Girls of the Night (Onna bakari no yoru), an emotionally charged melodrama on the plight of sex workers

Love Under the Crucifix (Ogin-sama), a sweeping historical drama of illicit love set in feudal Japan

Kristy Matheson, Creative Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, said: “I would like to thank all my programming and festival production colleagues for their smarts, dedication and generosity in preparing our 2022 edition. To the filmmakers who’ve trusted us with their stories, and our many collaborators for their time and creative input into the festival, a very big thanks. We’ve crafted a programme that we’re enormously proud of and we can’t wait to share it with audiences this Summer in Edinburgh.”

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