Rod White programmes what you can go and see at Filmhouse – and has done since the reopening in 2025. Here he picks the films to look out for in April for Edinburgh Reporter readers.
“If you see three films at Filmhouse this month” could be the name of this column, as I’ve enough space here to do justice to about three I’d say. With the rich variety of cinema contained within the Filmhouse monthly programme, narrowing it down to three is quite the challenge, but I’ll give it a go.
Returning to my accommodation one evening whilst at the Toronto Film Festival last year, standing in the foyer by the lifts, was one James McAvoy. He was at TIFF world-premiering his debut directorial feature, California Schemin’.
Rod PHOTO Kat Gollock
I introduced myself and, once he’d realised I wasn’t a crazed fan, was very warm and friendly and told me his film – which tells the true story of Dundonian hip hop duo Silibil N’ Brains who pass themselves off as West Coast (USA) artists to get a recording deal – had gone down very well at his screening. High-spirited, full of warmth and often very funny, I reckon it’ll go down very well here too!
Albert Camus’ novella The Stranger (L’étranger, 1942) has long been considered – like many a literary work written in the first-person and ‘existential’ in nature – unfilmable, though it has been filmed before. François Ozon beats both previous attempts with his finest film for years. Meursault, a detached and indifferent Frenchman living in colonial Algiers, sets the scene (as to his psychology and personality) with his apparent lack of feeling at the death of his mother… Among other things, a brilliant evocation of a time and a place.
A great story well told, Primavera tells of Cecilia, a 20-year-old orphan at the Ospedale della Pietà, the biggest orphanage in Venice and one in which the most talented of the ‘in-mates’ are introduced to the study of music.
A brilliant violinist, Cecilia seems unable to think of the word beyond finding her birth mother and enduring a forthcoming forced marriage, but then Antonio Vivaldi is reinstated as musical director… Expect great music and violin virtuosity, but don’t expect The Four Seasons, he hadn’t written it yet!
Rod White has been the film programmer for Filmhouse since it reopened in June 2025, and previously from 2004 to 2022.
https://www.filmhouse.org.uk/home
California Schemin
Primavera
The Stranger
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