The glitz, the glamour, the gossip ... 70 years of the Edinburgh International Film Festival

CELEBRATING ITS THREE SCORE AND 10, EDINBURGH’S WORLD-RENOWNED FILM FESTIVAL ROSE FROM HUMBLE POSTWAR BEGINNINGS TO BE A KEY INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRY EVENT. KARIN GOODWIN SALUTES THE SEPTUAGENARIAN EIFF

“I RARELY go to film festivals,” said legendary American director, screenwriter and actor John Huston. But, he conceded, “the only one that’s worth a damn is Edinburgh. My God, it’s unique”. He wasn’t wrong.

Chalking up 70 years of Hollywood stars, red carpets, premières and latenight parties, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which opens this week, has been the very essence of glitz and glamour for Scotland.

Founded as the International Festival of Documentary Films by the Edinburgh Film Guild in 1947, it was opened by John Grierson, the Scots father of the British documentary movement. Early audiences were treated to work of filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, husband of Ingrid Bergman, and introduced to the charming Gallic buffoonery of Jacques Tati.

Since then it’s seen world, European and UK premières of classics from Easy Rider and Alien to Taxi Driver and Withnail & I. It has pioneered retrospectives celebrating great directors like Douglas Sirk, Werner Herzog and Martin Scorsese, and introduced Scottish audiences to underground cinema from German New Wave to feminist film for the first time.

It can also lay claim to the first female film festival director anywhere in the world in The Commitments producer Lynda Myles, who presided over EIFF from 1973 to 1980.

Along the way it welcomed pretty much everyone who is anyone in Hollywood’s vast constellation of stars: Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Sean Connery, Sigourney Weaver, Clint Eastwood, Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett and Jennifer Lawrence are just a handful of the stars to grace Edinburgh’s red carpet. And who can forget much-loved homegrown stars Billy Connolly and Judi Dench in matchi ng tartan outfits for the screening of Mrs Brown in 1997?

After hours it’s been the place not only to party and consume Champagne cocktails, but where new ideas were born. It was at a late-night EIFF “do” in 1969 that a young, unknown Bill Forsyth, who had just screened his experimental film Waterloo, had to dodge a right