Edinburgh Film Podcast

Host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by author Caroline Young to discuss her new book Fashioning Hitchcock (Bloomsbury, 2026). Caroline is a prolific author and critic based in Edinburgh. Specialising in fashion, pop culture and classic cinema, her previous books include The It Girls: Glamor, Celebrity and Scandal (2025), Single & Psycho: How Pop Culture Shaped the Unhinged Woman (2025), Crazy O...

On this episode, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by Professor Mark Goble to discuss a visual effect that is used in everything from action films to football matches. Whether it’s to extend or amplify, to lyricise or clarify, slow motion is everywhere on our screens. Published by Columbia University Press, Mark’s book Downtime: The 20th Century in Slow Motion (2025) takes a close look at an effe...

On this episode, we dial down the sharpness and celebrate cinematic blurriness. Going against the common assumption that blur is only for backgrounds, a new book by Professor Martine Beugnet explores the power and poetics of the blurred image. Originally published in French in 2017,  Blur (2026) is part of the Cutaways series from Fordham University Press, where authors take a close look at o...

On this episode, we discuss the work of legendary comedy duo Laurel and Hardy , whose careers straddled both the silent and sound eras. They were active between the 1920s and the 1950s, making more than a hundred films together and their unmistakeable big man-little man dynamic would go on to influence many a comedy double-act, from Abbott and Costello to Morecambe and Wise. This year marks the ce...

Host Dr Pasquale Iannone goes back to Naples in the early 1900s to discuss a pioneer of silent cinema and Italy’s first woman filmmaker, Elvira Notari (1875 - 1946). Notari directed dozens of features and documentaries, but like so much from the silent era, only a small percentage of her work has survived. Most notably there are three films she made between 1920 and 1927 - A'  santanotte (192...

On this episode, host Dr Pasquale Iannone marks the centenary of one of the towering figures of world cinema, the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda. Born in 1926, Wajda was a clear-eyed and sensitive chronicler of Polish history, literature and culture in a film career spanning more than 65 years. He is probably best known for his war trilogy of the mid to late 1950s - A Generation (1955), Kanał (195...

On this episode, host Dr Pasquale Iannone discusses one of the finest action films ever made, John Woo’s masterpiece of Hong Kong 'Heroic Bloodshed'  Hard Boiled (1992) . The film has recently been restored in 4K and is about to be released in a special edition box set courtesy of Arrow Video. Starring Chow Yun Fat and Tony Leung, Hard Boiled tells of a hard drinking Hong Kong cop Yuen (aka T...

Host Dr Pasquale Iannone's guest on this episode of Edinburgh Film Podcast is the acclaimed British filmmaker Ben Wheatley . Since his 2009 debut, the crime thriller Down Terrace , Ben has specialised in highly inventive, unsettling, darkly funny pictures, often written in collaboration with his partner Amy Jump. From the hitman thriller Kill List (2011) to English Civil War drama A Field in Engla...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by author Ashley Clark to discuss his new book The World of Black Film (2026). Ashley is a writer, critic and broadcaster. He is also Curatorial Director at the Criterion Collection. His previous roles include director of film programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Ashley has curated film series at BFI Southbank and the...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone goes back to Japan in 1969 to discuss a lesser-known film from the iconoclastic New Wave filmmaker Nagisa Oshima . Oshima is best-known for subversive, controversial works such as the erotic drama In The Realm of the Senses (1976) and the David Bowie-starring war film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983) The episode focuses on Boy (1969) an ea...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone reports from Leith Kino, a micro cinema initiative set up by a veritable supergroup of film professionals and enthusiasts. The initiative - which is hosted by bar, restaurant and event space Leith Depot on Edinburgh’s Leith Walk - aims to provide a space for engagement with avant-garde, experimental, arthouse and trash film. Since September...

The first episode of 2026 is dedicated to extraordinary films of Hungarian filmmaker Zoltán Huszárik (1931 - 1981). Huszarik’s shorts and two feature films are dazzling in their formal experimentation and their attention to detail and texture. His work has gone on to influence contemporary filmmakers such as Peter Strickland ( The Duke of Burgundy, Flux Gourmet ). Huszárik’s small but remarkable f...

On this 20th and final episode of 2025, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by Professor Sir Christopher Frayling. Christopher is an internationally renowned educationalist, historian and broadcaster who spent more than 35 years at London’s Royal College of Art as Professor of Cultural History and then as Rector. Across more than five decades, Christopher has published widely on film, literature an...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by Professor Sue Harris. Sue is Professor Emerita of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London and an internationally-renowned specialist in French cinema. She has also published noted volumes on the Hollywood film musical, film stardom and production design. Sue is a trustee and collaborator of the long-running, UK-wide Fren...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by film programmer, researcher and writer Camilla Baier . Camilla is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in Film Exhibition and Curation programme and is also co-founder of the feminist film collective Invisible Women . Camilla discusses Invisible Women’s latest project, a touring film season celebrating the Golden Age...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone talks to award-winning British filmmaker Paul Andrew Williams about his new film Dragonfly . Built around two powerful performances by Oscar-nominated actors Brenda Blethyn and Andrea Riseborough, the film is set in Yorkshire and tells of elderly widow Elsie (Blethyn) who lives alone in her semi-detached bungalow with occasional help from ca...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone talks to recent University of Edinburgh filmmaking graduate Maryam Haddadi about her documentary self-portraits Accused Number 41 (2024) and Between Us (2025). Maryam studied the MA in Film Directing at Edinburgh College Art and her graduate film Accused Number 41 focuses on an incident that happened in her native Iran when she was arrested...

This episode of the podcast explores prison films, with a special focus on Swedish filmmaker Mai Zetterling’s lesser-known drama Scrubbers from 1982. Scrubbers stars Chrissie Cotterill as Annetta, a young mother serving a prison sentence at a female borstal. The film features many familiar faces, including Kathy Burke and Eva Mottley as Annetta’s fellow prisoners as well as Miriam Margoyles, Pam S...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by Dr Karen Pearlman . Karen is Associate Professor at MacQuarie University in Sydney and an internationally-renowned scholar of creative practice, distributed cognition and feminist film histories. Her many projects as editor and/or director include, most recently, her short film Breaking Plates (2024) which has screened at v...

In this episode, host Dr Pasquale Iannone explores some highlights from the 78th Edinburgh International Film Festival which took place in August 2025. Writer-director Mas Bouzidi tells Pasquale about his debut feature Concessions , a bittersweet comedy shot on 16mm which tells of the final day of business of a New York cinema. Pasquale is also joined by writer-director Gerard Johnson and lead act...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by writer, critic and academic Hannah McGill to discuss Poetic Realism, a 1930s trend in French cinema which combined the earthy and the ethereal to often mesmerising effect.   Whether shot in real locations or on large-scale sets, whether set in France or elsewhere around the globe, these early sound pictures are moody and melanch...

On this episode of the podcast, host Dr Pasquale Iannone sits down with Scottish writer-director (and University of Edinburgh alumnus) John Maclean to talk about his second feature Tornado (2025). The film had its world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival in February and went on general release in the UK in mid-June. Set in late 18th century Scotland, Maclean's film tells of a young Japanese wom...

This mini episode of the podcast marks the re-opening of Filmhouse, Edinburgh’s beloved independent cinema which was forced to close in October 2022 when its parent company went into administration. After the closure, a crowdfunding campaign was set up and support also came in from the Scottish and UK governments. The campaign to re-open Filmhouse as a brand-new organisation was spearheaded by fou...

The focus of this 60th episode of Edinburgh Film Podcast is Wanda , the only feature film directed by American actor-filmmaker Barbara Loden. Released in 1970, the film is set in rural Pennsylvania and tells of a working class woman (Loden) who leaves her husband and young children for a life on the road. She eventually drifts into a fraught, uneasy relationship with petty thief Norman Dennis (Mic...

On this episode, host Dr Pasquale Iannone is joined by award-winning writer, critic and broadcaster Ellen E. Jones. Ellen presents BBC Radio 4’s Screenshot with Mark Kermode and has written for The Guardian , The Observer , Little White Lies , Empire and many other outlets. In March this year, Ellen won the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Radio Presenter for her work on Screenshot . Ellen...