Eden Court’s Inverness Film Festival will celebrate 20 years as the Highlands’ flagship cinema event with a thrilling programme.
Festivalgoers can expect a typically wide-ranging seven-day programme of features, shorts and special events to mark the occasion.
Inverness Film Festival, which has screened around 500 feature films and 200 Scottish short films across two decades, will officially open with James Gray’s deeply personal Armageddon Time on November 4.
Highlights of this year’s programme also include Timothée Chalamet in Luca Guadagnino’s transgressive horror romance Bones and All, Charlotte Wells’ stunning feature debut Aftersun, and the return of Joanna Hogg with The Eternal Daughter, a gothic drama which sees Tilda Swinton deliver a riveting dual performance as both an artist and her elderly mother.
Eden Court’s Inverness Film Festival to return
Rebecca Holt, Eden Court’s chief executive, said: “Last year I attended IFF as a punter whilst at Eden Court for my interview as chief executive.
“I remember being so impressed by the calibre and diversity of films IFF had to offer and feeling butterflies in my stomach at the possibility that I might get to be part of its future.
“Now I have the pleasure and privilege of being here in its 20th year – and what a year it is. This festival is a celebration of IFF’s rich history and of Eden Court’s role as a home in the Highlands year-round in presenting the best international cinema.”
The festival’s documentary offering will feature an exploration of our entanglement with North Sea oil in The Oil Machine, followed by an in-person discussion with director Emma Davie.
The next generation of Scottish film talent will be represented with a host of shorts, plus director Paul Morris will be in attendance with his boldly ambitious, micro-budget debut feature Angry Young Men, a coming-of-age gangland comedy.
Shorts, talks and crowd-pleasers
A Scottish classic will be back on the big screen this year, as author Jonathan Melville and actor Jimmy Yuill join the festival for a special event screening of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero.
In international cinema, Jafar Panahi – currently imprisoned by the Iranian regime – returns with the urgent and defiant No Bears, in which Panahi mirrors his real-life predicament by playing a filmmaker working under the glare of suspicious eyes.
The festival also offers new cinema from all corners of the globe, including Georgia (What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?), Bhutan (Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom), Bolivia (Utama) and Costa Rica (Clara Sola).
A retrospective strand this year will celebrate some of the festival’s biggest crowd-pleasers from previous years, including the jaw-dropping space thriller Gravity, the Coen Brothers’ brutal and compelling No Country for Old Men, and IFF 2015 Audience Award-winner Brooklyn.
The festival will close on November 10 with The Menu, an outlandishly twisty foodie thriller directed by Mark Mylod, starring Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy.
Supporting local artists
This year’s anniversary edition is also being marked with a specially commissioned design by local artist Jacqueline Briggs. The illustration features iconic characters from previous Inverness Film Festival films rising out of Eden Court’s distinct façade.
Recognisable faces include Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Noomi Rapace (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men).
Paul MacDonald-Taylor, Inverness Film Festival director and head of film and visual art at Eden Court, reminisced of the very first festival.
He said: “I vividly remember being in the projection box for the opening film of the first IFF, in 2003, in the main auditorium waiting for the speeches to finish before pressing the start button on the 35mm projector.
“This year’s programme is one of the very best that we’ve put on. There’s always something special about discovering new films and directors at a film festival before you’ve read or heard about them elsewhere.
“I can’t wait to share all these wonderful films with our audiences this November. Hope you can come along, sit back, relax and enjoy.”
Tickets for this year’s festival – taking place from Friday November 4 to Thursday November 10 – are now available at eden-court.co.uk
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