Festival in Focus: Revamped Edinburgh Film Festival Launches With Strong Competition Strands Focused On World Premiere Titles & Attracting New Audiences
deadline.comAll official communications from the 2024 Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) organizers have described this year’s edition as “revamped” or “revitalized” — a pointed note to signpost that new management is at the helm.
The declaration is perhaps odd for an event that has often trumpeted its heritage, self-styling as the world’s “oldest continuously running film festival.” For the past two years, however, Edinburgh has been at the center of a significant period of turbulence within the Scottish film industry.
All the chaos can be traced back to the finances of Scotland’s Centre for the Moving Image (CMI), which collapsed in 2022. At the time, a statement from CMI executives 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.
As part of the CMI’s closure, operations at EIFF were shut down. The Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen, and Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh, the charity’s two celebrated physical cinema sites, also shut their doors.
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