SOME LIKE IT SCOT
Celebrating the genre-defining sci-fi movies of the ’70s and ’80s at the Edinburgh Film Festival...
The Scottish capital is home to several sci-fi conventions, but for its 60th anniversary, the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is celebrating with a massive retrospective on the very best science fiction cinema of the 1970s and ’80s.
The special Retrospective Programme will take a trip down memory lane to rediscover the daring visions and brave new worlds of some of sci-fi’s most influential creatives. The genre-defining likes of Star Wars and Alien took the decade out in style, and paved the way for a genre boom in the 1980s. The EIFF will pay homage to those greats, while lining up a packed screening schedule that includes Escape From New York, Blade Runner, Videodrome, Repo Man,
The Terminator and Brazil. The strand will also shine a light on iconic cult French director René Laloux, whose striking work, including La Planete Sauvage, Les Maîtres Du Temps and Gandahar, explores themes of communication and identity.
Although guest appearances have yet to be confirmed, you can expect some A-listers to be in attendance – previous years have seen the likes of Elijah Wood, Felicity Jones, Darren Aronofsky and Sigourney Weaver stopping by.
“The retrospective looks at the shape of things to come and features a selection of the most significant science-fiction films from that golden era in the early ’80s, several of which originally screened at Edinburgh,” says EIFF senior programmer Niall Fulton. “The whole idea is summed up by something Terry Gilliam once said about time travel allowing us to visit the future to look back at ourselves. He was right. The only difference is that we will go back to the past to look forward.”
For more information or tickets visit www.edfilmfest.org.uk