A Black Hawk of your own: Edinburgh Film Festival 2024
As predicted in this space because it was obvious a newly independent Edinburgh International Film Festival morphed again under its newest new management. The management has come up from London and brought several of their personal circle to replace the Scottish incumbents, so when the festival spoke it used accents from central London and central France, but not from the Central Belt.
Whether this makes for a branding problem depends on your perspective, although any EIFF in August has hurdles that a brand image might help with. On top of The August Problem of film availability, The August Problem of venue shortage was only solved by showing films at places like InSpace, essentially a media lab's entrance hall (an old EIFF film criticism workshop here during the Chris Fujiwara era had us sitting on the steps, which were more comfortable than the chairs provided this time); and Summerhall, famously home to some of the most crippling seating in Edinburgh. If EIFF is going to be as modest an event as this, and there are pros and cons, then squeezing into August and trying to be noticed is the hardest road.
Two films from EIFF 2024 reviewed for Critics Notebook:
Steppenwolf is hyperbolically, mesmerisingly violent, a revenge story from Kazakhstan modelled on Sergio Leone's offcuts and Sergio Leone's inspirations; but Leone knew you might be shifting towards the edge of your seat from mood and camera angles alone and so does this film. Male cynicism and uselessness and total needless self-annihilation, timeless topics.
Hollywoodgate is a documentary about America’s foreign forever-wars, also timeless. The Taliban inherits $7 billion-worth of abandoned US weaponry when the Americans shambolically depart Afghanistan; the new government ministers wander around compounds opening doors and finding more high-tech death machinery behind every one. Apart from a couple of visual insinuations, the film’s views about the Taliban are non-committal, not least since the director knew he might be shot on camera if he stated any. The Afghan women now listening out for any spruced up US Black Hawks approaching may be less equivocal.