Here's your guide to the debut directors at Edinburgh Film Festival

WILLIAM McGREGOR
AS director of BBC Scotland’s One of Us, The Misfits and some of the first series of Poldark, it is little wonder that William McGregor’s first film has been snapped up for mainstream cinema release.

Buoyed by the reception Gwen has already received, McGregor is now working on a second film as well as His Dark Materials for the BBC and HBO.

That’s despite Gwen, a gothic horror story, being eight years in the making and filming being halted several times due to 70mph winds, snow and flooding on location in Wales.

“It was a hardship but if you choose to shoot in Snowdonia in November and December, it’s your own fault, really!” said McGregor.

It was tough for the production team but even tougher for the cast, which includes Maxine Peake, as they were in period costume.

Peake said she agreed to play the part after being told that although it was based on the folk-horror genre it was really about “the evils of capitalism, and the effects the industrial revolution had on the landscape and the environment”.

“Politically, anything like that piques my interest but I’m a big fan of this genre anyway,” she said. “And scripts like this don’t come along that often.”

Set amongst the stark beauty of 19th century Snowdonia, the film tells the story of a young girl who tries desperately to hold her home together. She is struggling with her mother’s mysterious illness, her father’s absence and a ruthless mining company, as well as the suspicions of the local community who turn on Gwen and her family.

“I have an interest in folk stories and the Gothic, particularly any set within the British landscape,” said McGregor. “I think as a nation we have a slightly morbid fascination with the uncanny and the grim; it’s cathartic.

“I also believe that in a world where we’re feeling more distant from our landscape and our traditions and our roots, as we spend more time surrounded by increasing amount of concrete and screens, that perhaps stories like this are more appealing.”

The film goes on general release on July 19 in the UK before its release in the US.

ADEWALE AKINNUOYE-AGBAJE
DROPPED off by his Nigerian parents with a working class white family in Essex when he was just six weeks old, Hollywood star Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was not picked up again until he reached the age of 8.

He flew to Africa with his parents the next day but the trauma and culture shock was so great he did not speak for nine months.

He was just one of many Nigerian children farmed out to white foster families in post-Second World War Britain so their parents could work by day and study by night in an attempt to better their lives.

It was seen as a practical solution at the time, with many parents believing it would benefit their children, but families were often separated for years and sometimes never reunited.

The practice is now largely forgotten which is one reason for Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s autobiographical film Farming which is showing at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

It tells the story of how he was sent to live with a family who had at least ten African children living in their house at certain points.

“The household was poor so it was a stretch,” Akinnuoye-Agbaje told the National.

“I was taken there at six weeks old and then I came home from school one day when I was eight to see an African couple in the living room. I was taken to Nigeria the next day but all I had known was foster parents and the British way of life, so it was hugely traumatic.

“I was suddenly in amongst the heat, the mosquitos and a strange language. It was a real culture shock and I was so traumatised I ceased to talk for nine months.”

After a year his parents sent him back to the UK in the hope it would help but instead it led to an identity crisis and he eventually joined a local skinhead gang in order to escape racial persecution at their hands. After a suicide attempt he managed to turn his life around and became an actor, with his credits including Game of Thrones, Lost, Oz, Thor, and The Bourne Identity.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje decided to make the film, partly in frustration at some of the roles he was being offered as a black actor, but also to come to terms with his background. His screenplay won the Annenberg award but it still took ten years to raise the money needed to make the film.

“It was an arduous and long battle to get the finance as it was not pitched at a time of great diversity, although it is now a little bit better,” he said.

“However I feel I have matured as a film maker and it is the right time to tell the story as today’s politics are so polarising. They are trying to separate people and borders and there are policies where immigrants that have worked for the country for 50 years are expelled.”

He added: “From a logistic point of view it was tough to make as the film jumps from the 60s and 70s to the 80s which is very ambitious for a first-time director.

“It was also emotionally cathartic and very challenging as I had to relive experiences of my life that were not necessarily pleasant. I played my own father which was a very surreal experience.”

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Damson Idris plays the young Akinnuoye-Agbaje while Kate Beckinsale is his white working class mother.

“I’m extremely pleased I was able to tell the story uncompromisingly and that I kept it true to what occurred at the time,” said Akinnuoye-Agbaje.

“The film’s themes are identity, racism and self-worth but it is a story of hope as it is a coming of age story about triumph over adversity with a wonderful redemptive quality.”

GRETA BELLAMANICA
BEING pregnant gave first time feature director Greta Bellamacina an added incentive to speed up the filming of Hurt by Paradise, which is nominated for the 2019 Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film.

As she also plays the protagonist, Celeste, the cast and crew had to work quickly to complete her scenes before the bump began to show.

“I had to wear a lot of coats during the summer to cover it up,” said Bellamacina, who is also a poet and publisher. The film is a real family affair as her artist husband Robert Montgomery, a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art from Chapelhall in Lanarkshire, helped out with directing when she was on screen and their three-year-old son, Lorca, plays Celeste’s son.

Described as Woody Allen meets Frances Ha, the film is about a young mother trying to carve out a career as a poet in modern-day London. Meanwhile, friend and neighbour, Stella, dreams of being an actor but spends much of her time babysitting Celeste’s son.

It isn’t strictly autobiographical although Bellamacina, who has made a number of short films and a documentary about the decline of British libraries, admits there are elements of her in the story.

“I understand how hard it is to make a living from your art and survive on it,” she said. “I know what it is like to be in that frustrated position where you can’t get anyone in the real world to take you seriously but you survive through day dreaming.

“I just wanted to show how in life you end up having these friendships through circumstances and your friends become a sort of family. Nothing goes well for Celeste and Stella – they have big dreams that neither of them seem able to achieve but they find solace in each other.”

The film also stars Camilla Rutherford of Gosford Park, Nicholas Rowe who was young Sherlock and Veronica Clifford, the very annoying aunt in Harry Potter.

Bellamacina, who went back to edit the film six days after giving birth to another boy, said she had moments of “complete panic” when making it.

“I would wake up in the middle of night sometimes as I found the post production side was a bit like a puzzle where you are trying to piece it altogether,” she said. “I went into this blind in a sense so I feel very lucky as it has had a fantastic reception so far.”

MATT ROBERTS
WHAT happens when love can come at the swipe of a finger? How can you stay content with what you have when there’s a plethora of options out there and Instagram is constantly showing you pictures of people living what appear to be fabulous lives?

Matt Roberts looks at these questions in his debut feature, a wry take on the British rom-com in the technological age.

Masters of Love is about a group of friends who are at different stages in their relationships with none of them convinced about what they’re doing.

In making it, Roberts said he had the chance to work with long term collaborators and friends and explore what it means to be thirty-something in the UK today.

“For me the thirties are a second coming-of-age,” he said. “You’re through the messiness of teenage years and the cockiness of the twenties and into a new bracket where things are expected of you – it’s time to settle down, time to get married, to buy a house, to have some kids, to get a promotion. But what if none of those things are happening? What happens if you feel like you’re back to square one? Or that you never left that square in the first place?”

The founder of London based production company Truck Films, Roberts’ shorts have been shown at some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, including Palm Springs, and have been nominated at the British Comedy Awards. Masters of Love was self-financed which meant it was so low budget its cast, which includes Ciaran Dowd, winner of the best comedy newcomer at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, worked for free.

It meant the shoot had to be done in a fortnight so everyone could go back to work, but the plus side was that there were no financiers pressuring Roberts to speed up the editing process.

“I loved making it although it was all consuming,” he said. “I was very lucky that I was working with brilliant people. There was great camaraderie on set and a sense of ownership of the film between everyone that was working on it.”

SASHA COLLINGTON
DOES a loser in love gene really exist? It’s a question Sasha Collington is often asked. That’s because her new film comedy is about a woman who is dumped twelve times in a row, then discovers to her dismay that she has a loser in love gene. 

She’s not alone as it is estimated by scientists that one in five people have the gene for romantic misfortune, according to Love Type D, which received its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and is nominated for the audience award.

It’s a scary thought particularly when some geneticists believe trauma or a victory doesn’t just affect people’s mindsets - it can also affect their genetic code.

“I was really curious to hear that experiences within your own lifetime can affect your genetic code,” said Collington. “Everybody makes these bad choices and it is terrible to think that some decision you made when you were 12 affects you for the rest of your life.”

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In the film, the ill-starred romantic Frankie is played by Maeve Dermody who is soon to be seen in The Secret Garden, alongside Colin Firth and Amazon’s new fantasy series, Carnival Row. 

Wilbur, the 12-year-old who advises her, is played by Rory Stroud – formerly Bobby Beale in EastEnders and the cast also includes acting newcomer, William Joseph Firth, last seen on screen with his father Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Baby.

Love Type D has been five years in the making, more of an obstacle for Collington than raising the finance.

“The hardest bit was the length of time and keeping my enthusiasm going,” she said. 

“It feels like everything that will go wrong does go wrong, particularly when you are on a low budget.”

However Collington became so adept at raising finance she was awarded a Linbury Scholarship for an executive MBA at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford, starting this September.

She already has an MA in filmmaking from the London Film School and her most recent short film, Lunch Date, was screened at festivals across the US.