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Edinburgh International Film Festival director Shane Danielsen, departing after five controversial but energising years in the job, has always maintained that 'surprise' was what he was hoping to offer audiences. In the grim summer blockbuster season, it's a celluloid commodity too often in short supply, but Edinburgh thankfully came up with the goods again for 2006.
Given the event's relatively modest resources, they can't compete for titles with the likes of Venice, Toronto or even the English behemoth which is the London Film Festival, but the EIFF takes the approach that if it can't bag the biggest movies, it can at least showcase some of the most interesting ones.
And there's always some out-of-nowhere title which makes a splash. This year who would have imagined that a tiny British film with no stars and a first-time director nobody had heard of would be the talk of the festival? Well, Paul Andrew Williams' London to Brighton was a bit like a Ken Loach remake of Get Carter, with a 12-year-old homeless girl and a streetwise prostitute on the run from a ruthless pimp and his even shadier underworld connections. Bracingly tough yet ultimately compassionate, it was one of those films where you look along the row and see people hunched forward in their seats, chewing their nails. A deserved winner of the festival's New Director's Award, its UK distributors are currently planning a December release - certainly an astringent alternative to seasonal cheer.
