The celebration of Scottish and especially Highland Cinema is one of two themes running through this year’s Inverness Film Festival (9-12 November 2006), organisers announced today.

Opening the festival is the Scottish premiere of The Last King of Scotland, starring James McAvoy as a young doctor who travels to Uganda and becomes seduced by the power and charisma of the dictator Idi Amin.

Skye-born director Douglas MacKinnon will introduce his film The Flying Scotsman as the closing night gala. Starring Johnny Lee Miller and Brian Cox, the film is a fantastic recreation of Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree’s fight against depression and institutional snobbery.

The Island Tapes is a live performance of a new music score to silent black and white films of life on Scottish islands in the 1920s and 30s.

A Hebridean double-bill of Play Me Something (1989) starring John Berger and Tilda Swinton and the rarely seen dark melodrama The Brothers (1947) complete the strong line up of Scottish cinema.

A second theme of the festival, ‘Distant Worlds’, features films set in extreme environments and ‘peripheral’ cultures, and includes the Scottish premieres of Babel, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett; the Inuit film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen; the first ever film in an aboriginal language, Ten Canoes; and the astonishingly-titled 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, a documentary following the Pamir Kirghiz tribe of Central Asia.

Festival co-programmer Matt Lloyd said: “As the UK’s most northerly film festival, we felt Inverness’s programme should reflect the values of the Highlands, whether through revisiting classic local films, or through selecting international titles set in remote and dramatic locations, in which ancestry and storytelling are to the fore. Films
from varied and distant worlds demonstrate a common sense of humanity, which is, after all, the most important message Cinema can offer.”

Other treats include the UK premieres of Oliver Parker’s Fade to Black, starring Danny Houston as Orson Welles, and Poland’s entry to the Oscars, The Collector, directed by veteran Felix Falks.