From Fri 4 - Thu 10 Nov, Eden Court's Inverness Film Festival returns - and this year we're celebrating 20 years as the Highlands’ flagship cinema event!
This year’s opening film is James Gray’s deeply personal Armageddon Time, a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of Reagan’s America, starring Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong. The festival will close with The Menu, an outlandishly twisty foodie thriller directed by Mark Mylod, starring Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy.
Highlights of this year’s programme include Timothée Chalamet in Luca Guadagnino’s transgressive horror romance Bones and All, Charlotte Wells’ stunning feature debut Aftersun (starring Normal People’s Paul Mescal) and the return of Joanna Hogg with The Eternal Daughter, a gothic drama which sees Tilda Swinton deliver a riveting dual performance as both an artist and her elderly mother.
The festival’s documentary offering begins with an exploration of our entanglement with North Sea oil in The Oil Machine, followed by an in-person discussion with director Emma Davie. Ephemeral sees Alastair Lee follow Guy Robertson and Greg Boswell to the peaks of some of Scotland’s most stunning climbs, while Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras celebrates photographer and activist Nan Goldin in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.
The next generation of Scottish film talent is represented with a host of shorts, plus director Paul Morris will be in attendance to present his boldly ambitious, micro-budget debut feature Angry Young Men, a coming-of-age gangland comedy. A Scottish classic will be back on the big screen this year, as author Jonathan Melville and actor Jimmy Yuill join the festival for a special event screening of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero.
In international cinema, Jafar Panahi (currently imprisoned by the Iranian regime) returns with the urgent and defiant No Bears, in which Panahi mirrors his real-life predicament by playing a filmmaker working under the glare of suspicious eyes. The festival also offers new cinema from all corners of the globe, including Georgia (What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?), Bhutan (Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom) and Costa Rica (Clara Sola). Marginalised languages will enjoy some screen time with Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s stunning cinematic Quechua-language debut Utama, and Carla Simón’s highly-acclaimed Catalan-language Alcarràs, winner of the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlinale.
A retrospective strand this year will celebrate some of the festival’s biggest crowd-pleasers from previous years, including the jaw-dropping space thriller Gravity, the Coen Brothers’ brutal and compelling No Country for Old Men, and IFF 2015 Audience Award-winner Brooklyn.
This year’s anniversary edition is also being marked with a specially commissioned design by local artist Jacqueline Briggs. The illustration features iconic characters from previous Inverness Film Festival films rising out of Eden Court’s distinct façade. Recognisable faces include Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Noomi Rapace (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men).
Tickets for this year's dynamic programme of features, shorts and special events are on sale now!
