Bridging the Gap premieres at EIFF! 🌺 This year's theme is 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗹𝘀. Six stories running alongside each other, connected by the echoes between them. From a vanishing therapeutic community existing in parallel to the outside world, to two Michaels from the North East pushing back against queer erasure; from two ‘Irish Giants’ separated by centuries yet connected by a rare condition, to a Scottish refinery’s slow decline mirroring tensions between renters and landlords. And finally, through the lives of feral cats, a reflection of our own fractured relationship with the natural world. ✻ AMONGST MEN dir. Katie McFadden ✻ CHERRY PICKER dir. Olive Jones ✻ FERAL dir. Miranda Rose Carter-Watson ✻ NO PLACE LIKE HOME dir. Michael Lee Richardson ✻ HIDDEN TREES dir. Sophie van Bree ✻ WHEN THE FIRES STOP dir. Matthew Dunsmore 𝗦𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀: Tue 18 Aug 2026 | 18:00 | The Cameo Wed 19 Aug 2026 | 14:00 | Cineworld

What does it look like to live in a city that is a key participant in a giant, often elitist cultural industry? What happens if you live here, make art, but don’t have access to the funding and platforms that lead to prestige and success? What is it like to have a world famous arts festival come to town that often seems to exist in a separate dimension from the lives of most of the city’s residents? And what does access to arts and education mean in practice, especially for working class people and those existing outside of the city and wider central belt? Join us for a programme of short films and discussion to explore these questions collectively. Business As Usual (2024, Brazil/Portugal, 23 minutes) Okay Keskidee Let Me See Inside (2025, UK, 20 minutes) Community Theatre (2025, Scotland,13 minutes) Arts The Catalyst (2004, Scotland, 17 minutes We will have an introduction from EMBASSY and a post screening discussion, moderated by Rachel Hamada from Take One Action, who will be joined by: Tomiwa Folorunso, co chair at Take One Action, and founder of JALI film weekender Lewis Baillie, director, Community Theatre Hayley Dawson, Scottish Working Class Network Rehan Yousuf, Sett Studios and former North Edinburgh Arts Community Worker Access: All films will have dialogue subtitles. Please let us know if you need BSL interpretation when booking. You can find more access information on the EMBASSY website.

Grassmarket Community Picturehouse Collaborates with the Edinburgh Film Guild for a series of four masterpieces of Italian cinema. In La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro) directs Josh O'Connor as Arthur, a fresh-out-of-prison archaeologist who joins up with his old gang of tombaroli, grave robbers who survive by looting Etruscan tombs and fencing the ancient treasures they dig up, all while haunted by the ghosts of lost love. This screening is presented in part of a series of 4 masterpieces of Italian cinema, in collaboration with the Edinburgh Film Guild.

This August, Argonaut Books and Leith Kino are joining forces for a special Book Fringe collaboration. One of the great trends of 2020s publishing has been the new English-language translations of Japanese mystery and crime fiction from across the 20th Century. Chief among the authors getting this treatment has been Seishi Yokomizo, a prolific writer of murder mysteries whose eccentric detective Kosuke Kindaichi has been read as Japan's answer to Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. The Inugami Family is a 1970s adaptation of Yokomizo's The Inugami Curse (1951) and the first of many adaptations directed by Kon Ichikawa that would find great popularity in Japan over the next few years. Written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, The Inugami Family sees Kindaichi navigate the spiteful world of Japanese aristocracy after a wealthy patriarch dies and leaves a juicy will to his greedy descendants.

GCP Collaborates with the Edinburgh Film Guild for a series of four masterpieces of Italian cinema. In The Four Times (Le quattro volte) An old goat shepherd lives in a quiet village in the hills of Calabria that most villagers have left long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his cure in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day. But soon, his soul will move on through four successive lives. This screening is presented in part of a series of 4 masterpieces of Italian cinema, in collaboration with the Edinburgh Film Guild.

This August, Argonaut Books and Leith Kino are joining forces for a special Book Fringe collaboration. “When you talk about The Swimmer will you talk about yourself? Adapting John Cheever’s 13-page short story into feature length, filmmaker Frank Perry brought The Swimmer’s vision of mid-century American suburban life with help from a screenplay written by his wife Eleanor. A hazy, sun-drenched odyssey through an affluent neighbourhood in Connecticut, The Swimmer opens with a strange introduction to its main character. Half-naked and bursting out of the woods, Burt Lancaster’s Ned Merrill gleefully exclaims that he plans on finding his way home not through walking but through swimming a path through his neighbours' pools. Along his journey, Merrill’s encounters with fellow members of the upper-middle class progressively reveals what truly lies beneath the swimmer’s cheery demeanor and a dark undercurrent at the heart of this seemingly idyllic lifestyle. Now a cult classic, Perry’s film long went underappreciated and is now considered a landmark work that features a career best performance by Burt Lancaster and a laser sharp critique of the American Dream.

GCP Collaborates with the Edinburgh Film Guild for a series of four masterpieces of Italian cinema. Master Italian auteur Federico Fellini directs Amarcord, the story of Titto, a young boy growing up in Borgo San Giuliano in 1930s fascist Italy, and the interesting cast of characters he meets along the way. This screening is presented in part of a series of 4 masterpieces of Italian cinema, in collaboration with the Edinburgh Film Guild.

GCP Collaborates with the Edinburgh Film Guild for a series of four masterpieces of Italian cinema. A mute gunslinger fights in the defense of a group of outlaws and a vengeful young widow, against a group of ruthless bounty hunters in this classic spaghetti western. This screening is presented in part of a series of 4 masterpieces of Italian cinema, in collaboration with the Edinburgh Film Guild.

Welcome to the screening of our DocuClub Edi, a part of the Docudays UA family. We will watch ‘The Hamlet Syndrome’, directed by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski’. A few months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, five young women and men participate in a unique stage production that attempts to relate their war experiences to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

“We’re making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered.” Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's debut feature is a 'post-biopic' of the revolutionary Martiniquan anti-colonial writer, Suzanne Césaire. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024) embraces the gaps of memory, opting instead to transmit the glorious messages that Suzanne left behind in her essays. The cast and crew recite fragments of Césaire's work, hynoptically pulling us into a film within a film. In other scenes, they reenact Aimé, her husband, and Suzanne's lives. Time collapses, nature endures. Aptly shot on the grounds of a palm tree archive, Hunt-Ehrlich restates Césaire's Afrosurrealist convictions in a paradise of Black feminist history.