The Sunday Herald's film critic on this year's festival
Much has been made of the number of female filmmakers featured at Edinburgh this year, in stark contrast to other film festivals, most notably Cannes. The world's greatest film showcase is yet so mired in old habits and loyal to perennial favourites that it's almost impossible for women to get a look in.
Cynics might tell you that a desire for representative cinema is one thing, finding films that actually deliver is another. So I'm delighted to report that in my four-day burst at Edinburgh, films made by women - and sometimes made by men about female experience - dominated the highlights.
Some of these were emotionally challenging, for different reasons. Novelist Helen Walsh's The Violators, which follows the efforts of an impoverished, parentless teenage girl to survive a Northern sink estate where men are almost entirely predatory, takes the naturalistic tradition of Ken Loach and the Dardennes brothers and adds a huge amount of discomfort and tension. Jane Linfoot's The Incident follows the repercussions when a man buys sex from a vulnerable girl, her theme the gulf between the haves and the have nots, in particular how the affluent are often afraid to acknowledge that the poor even exist.
Like Walsh, Linfoot imbues social-realist subject matter with the cinematic gusto of genre filmmaking - there is a scene in The Incident that is as chilling as any horror film. Both were in in town with first features, but are clearly directors to be watched.
If their films make one bristle with anger, Marielle Heller plays a dangerous game by making us laugh at behaviour that really won't do. The Diary Of A Teenage Girl concerns the coming-of-age through sexual misadventure of a 15-year-old in 1970s San Francisco, after she starts an affair with her mother's boyfriend. The illegality of the man's actions is barely acknowledged by the film, just as it isn't by the free loving hedonists at its centre; and it's a weakness. That said, Heller is more interested in a young heroine (brilliantly played by Brit Bel Powley) who is more in control of her actions than any of the adults on display, and has so much character that she'll certainly survive their mistakes.
Another film that was both funny and thought-provoking was Shira Piven's Welcome To Me, a broad satire on America's obsessions with fame, TV and self-realisation. Kristen Wiig is so good she's scary as a woman with borderline personality disorder, who wins millions in the lottery and spends it on her own chat show - which is all about herself. It's easy to roar with laughter at her shenanigans, but the story has a dark subtext - about how so much of American culture is a genuine threat to mental health - that could have been explored further.
I was struck by two films directed by men but with women centre stage. Jamie Adams's Black Mountain Poets was a wonderfully batty, wholly improvised comedy, in which Alice Lowe and Dolly Wells play sisters on the run from the law, who pose as performance poets in order to hide out in a poetry retreat. Amid the wackiness is a very sweet tale about troubled siblings who must learn to go their separate ways.
The Japanese 100 Yen Love was a bittersweet, very eccentric comedy charting a 32-year-old female slacker's attempts to get her life in order - first by working in a 24-hour- discount store, then more seriously by training to become a boxer. Actress Sakura Ando gave an enormously charming Q&A after the screening, in which she quite rightly stated her unhappiness that her character exited the story with the obnoxious and underserving male lead. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the next time we see Ando in Edinburgh it will be behind the camera.
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