Programme unveiled for international film festival

● Scots top the billing for 70th birthday celebrations

John Hannah, Ewen Bremner, Tilda Swinton and Kate Dickie are among the stars set to launch new work at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this summer.

An Edinburgh-set feature film inspired by the music of The Waterboys and a documentary charting the rise of Scottish indie banks including Teenage Fanclub, Jesus and Mary Chain, and Primal Scream will also be unveiled at the event.

Sir Sean Connery and Robbie Coltrane will be honoured with retrospective screenings of their previous work at the event, which will also a rare screening of a TV thriller adapted from an Ian Rankin short story, Reichenbach Falls.

Sunshine on Leith stars Kevin Guthrie and Freya Mavor will also be launching brand new films at the 12-day festival, which will be celebrating its 70th anniversary in June and July.

Hannah, who shot to fame in Four Weddings and a Funeral, will be starring in The Marker, a noir thriller about a criminal seeking redemption by tracking down the daughter of the woman he killed.

Swinton, a long-time patron of the film festival, stars alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in Okja, a new South Korean-american fantasy adventure in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, about a schoolgirl’s friendship with a giant pig.

Dickie, best known for Red Road, Game of Thrones and Prometheus, will be playing a transsexual character in her film film, Natalie, while Bremner has produced No Song To Sing, about a professional femme fatale working for a Tokyo club.

Guthrie, who recently appeared in the big-screen adaptation of Sunset Song, will star opposite veteran English actress Sheila Hancock in Edie, a drama about a recently-bereaved woman in her eighties who decides to climb a mountain in the Highlands.

Skins favourite Mavor will be staring opposite Josh Whitehouse in Modern Life Is Rubbish, about a couple in the throes of a break-up reliving the highlights of their relationship while splitting up their record collection.

X-men and The Aviator actor Danny Huston has directed and stars in The Last Photograph, which is said to revolve around the story of the Lockerbie disaster.

0 Film festival patron Tilda Swinton is among the stars on screen

Revealing the line-up, festival director Mark Adams said: “Scottish talent has always been at the heart of the festival and I’m thrilled to once again illuminate the great work that currently exists within the country.

“The quality, variety and breadth of this year’s programme is a true testament to the high-level of craftsmanship in past and present Scottish film”.