AT A film festival, everyone is a bit of a junkie. In fewer than two weeks, depending on your reprobate tendencies and tolerance, you can see more films than many people manage in a year.
Hungry and baggy-eyed, you stagger from screening to screening, hoping the next film can produce a buzz more intense than the last one. Sometimes you get word of the good stuff: a Let The Right One In or Encounters At The End Of The World. Sometimes you get stuck with Faintheart. At first, it's exhilarating; after a while it can just be knackering. Yet it's addictive.
It was hard not to think in these terms as the 63rd Edinburgh Film Festival unveiled its programme last week. It's Hannah McGill's third outing as artistic director, and the festival is still coping with its move from August to June. Distributors hate the new summer position – too close to Cannes, not close enough to the rest of the Edinburgh festivals apparently – and many of the larger companies such as Paramount and Universal don't seem to be coming this year. Even Disney, which has given Edinburgh two Pixar coups with premieres of WALL-E and Ratatouille, was unable to add its buoyant balloon travel adventure Up to this year's schedule because the picture, Disney's first venture into 3D, is still being refined.
Yet there's a lot to cheer about in this year's line-up. Sam Mendes' first full-on comedy Away We Go seems to neatly encapsulate Edinburgh's mix of the offbeat and the experimental as it kicks off a showcase for 135 features this June, including 23 world premieres; enough to feed any serious film habit.
In the summertime when the blockbusters rumble into multiplexes like juggernauts, Hollywood needs reminding that films can be vibrant means of entertainment without demonstrating how many ways you can crash through a plate-glass window or save the planet. Edinburgh's line-up is stuffed with reminders that while the credit crunch landed late last year for some, independent moviemakers have been working frugally for years, not least the subject of this year's retrospective: a spry octogenarian who made his fortune from cheap thrills. Roger Corman directed dozens of low-budget horror movies and mentored people as varied as Francis Ford Coppola, John Sayles, Jack Nicholson and another of this year's festival guests, Joe Dante, who cut his film teeth by cutting trailers for Corman epics, then went on to film his own monster mash, including two helpings of pureed Gremlins. It was Dante who used to joke that if the cost-conscious Corman had shot Lawrence Of Arabia, TE would never leave the tent – you'd just glimpse a lone camel leased for a day's filming and hear the wind blowing through sand outside.
Appropriately for the year of Homecoming, the Scottish strands sound stronger than last year, when the line-up included the decidedly rocky Stone Of Destiny. Home-grown films and filmmakers may be better represented by the likes of David Mackenzie, who is bringing his sex comedy Spread starring Ashton Kutcher, while older path breakers such as Bill Forsyth and Bill Douglas are celebrated too. Forsyth has been on everyone's mind of late. Edinburgh's younger, vigorous rival, the Glasgow Film Festival, held a special cast and crew celebration of his bittersweet ice-cream classic Comfort And Joy back in February, and was a constant point of reference in STV's spring celebration of Scottish film. From his rise in the Eighties to his waning in the Nineties, Forsyth was first uncomfortably fetishised then later disgracefully ignored. Even if Forsyth doesn't like Gregory's Girl very much now, if anyone deserves a proper homecoming, it's this local hero. Other homing pigeons include Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky, making a return here a decade after his last trip with his early feature Pi, while Midlands filmmaker Shane Meadows is bringing the premiere of Le Donk and is now such an Edinburgh regular that he must have earned the right to his own set of keys by now.
A film festival is a tricky balance of local pride and international curiosity; so fingers crossed the festival's Bengali showcase may yet turn out to be more exciting and unexpected than it sounds. Bollywood actress Sharmila Tagore will be among those promoting the event. I'm looking forward to the Michael Powell awards, not because we need to officially separate Edinburgh's programme into winners and losers, but because last year's ceremony was rather charming, hosted by Janice Forsyth and festival patron Sir Sean Connery in a benevolent fashion not unlike a prize-giving at a children's tea party. Watching a clip of an award-winner Werner Herzog penguin waddling purposefully into the unknown, Connery announced amiably but cryptically to the audience: "Sometimes, I feel like that penguin."
Even though the EIFF has finally unveiled its schedule for this year and peppered its ten days with well-kent names like Meera Syal, Lord Puttnam and Brenda Blethyn and acknowledged class acts such as Steven Soderbergh and Dario Argento, there's still plenty that is unknown and undiscovered in the 2009 film festival. It's a line-up that makes penguins of us all.
• Edinburgh International Film Festival, 17-28 June,
www.edfilmfest.org.ukNOT TO BE MISSED… MESRINEDouble bill from Jean-François Richet, starring everyone's favourite French gangster Vincent Cassell.
Killer Instinct: 20/21 June; Public Enemy No 1: 20/22 June
MOONSam Rockwell is the man on the moon whose stark surroundings begin to take on sinister behaviour.
20/23 June
FISH TANKRed Road director Andrea Arnold returns with the tale of 15-year-old dancer Mia.
21/24 June
RUDO Y CURSIGael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna reunite for the first time since Y Tu Mamá También, as a pair of football-mad brothers.
21/24 June
THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCEAmerican porn star Sasha Grey takes the lead in Steven Soderbergh's new project.
24/27 June
THE CRIMSON WINGDisney's new wildlife spectacular following the lives of flamingos.
25/26 June
ADAMRose Byrne and Hugh Dancy star in this tale of love triumphing over Asperger's syndrome.
27 June
