The Edinburgh International Film Festival 2026 (13-19 August) presents a lineup that showcases a Scottish industry in rude health, with a diverse range of films from transformative Shakespearean ballets to a kinky BDSM noir. Here are 10 must-see movies from this year's festival, each offering a unique cinematic experience.
Mission and Borges and Me: A Scottish and Literary Focus
Mission features George MacKay in a viscerally intense performance, directed by Paul Wright of For Those in Peril fame. MacKay plays Dylan, a troubled restaurant worker who snaps during a corporate performance assessment, embarking on an anguished and violent journey into his own past.
Borges and Me brings to life a semi-legendary moment in Scottish literary history: when the great Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges was taken on a chaotic tour of the Highlands in 1971 by a hapless PhD student, with the blind author insisting on having everything described to him. This sweet comedy, adapted from Jay Parini's book, stars Chilean comic actor Luis Gnecco as Borges.
Snapshot and These Violent Delights: Genre Twists
Snapshot is a wayward, mischievous black-comic horror in flickering monochrome. It suggests that a mysterious Victorian inventor created cinema long before we thought, even recording lip-sync sound on wax cylinders. The cameraperson is shooting a true-crime documentary about attempts to unmask Jack the Ripper.
These Violent Delights is Scottish Ballet's engrossing, transformative dance riff on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Fierce, athletic, knotty, and sensual, it's not a filmed proscenium event but a film inhabiting its own theatrical space—a radically impressionistic compression performed with commitment and style.
Pretty Babies and The Education of Jane Cumming: Dark Dramas
Pretty Babies is a stark drama from debut director Tyler-Marie Evans, exploring Hollywood's dark underbelly and the link between sex work and show business. Two young women escape their oppressive home town, believing LA's streets are paved with celebrity gold, and find themselves face to face with the sex industry.
The Education of Jane Cumming is an exhilaratingly candid, intelligent movie by German filmmaker Sophie Heldman about a real-life 19th-century Scottish libel case that inspired The Children's Hour, involving two female teachers accused of lesbianism in a homophobic age. Fiona Shaw has a delectable cameo as a haughty Scots aristocrat.
Her Private Hell and Queen at Sea: Refn and Powerful Performances
Her Private Hell marks the return of dark master Nicolas Winding Refn with a bizarre fantasia of dread, a twist on the British 60s pulp shocker by Norman J Warren. Set in a nightmarish hotel between hallucination and memory, where a film production is discussed, it executes a slow dervish swirl of hypnotic, toxic strangeness.
Queen at Sea features Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall in unbearably powerful, award-winning performances about dementia, the endgame of care, and decisions when the spouse-carer is as vulnerable as the patient. Their pairing recalls their Hamlet and Ophelia on stage in 1968.
Northbound and I Want Your Sex: Legends and Transgression
Northbound/In Conversation: Bruce Dern offers a chance to see the Hollywood legend in the flesh. Dern, star of Silent Running, Coming Home, and Nebraska, appears live on stage to discuss his life. His new film Northbound sees him as an elder scallywag who recruits his prissy grandson to break out of his care home and head for freedom in Canada.
I Want Your Sex is Gregg Araki's transgressive BDSM kink-positive neo-noir romp, with Olivia Wilde as imperious dominatrix Erika, a black-clad contemporary artist with a complex relationship with her bedazzled assistant and muse Elliot, played by Cooper Hoffman. The festival runs from 13-19 August.
