Another year of the Edinburgh International Film Festival comes to a close, the second under Paul Ridd and Emma Boa’s leadership. This year’s programme was striking not for any single breakout film, but for the way it brought together young directors experimenting with form, established auteurs reflecting on history, and films that spoke, each in their own way, to questions of youth, family, institutions, and the weight of the past. It was a programme that refused neat answers, instead drawing attention to the conditions under which stories are told and the responsibilities of cinema itself.

Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project (USA, UK/ 2025/ 91 mins) is perhaps the exact expression of this reflexive impulse. What begins as an attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s conspiracy text The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge becomes instead a film about the impossibility, and absurdity, of doing so. Shackleton narrates the documentary he could never make, projecting empty images of landscapes and generic settings as stand-ins for what might have been. The result is a work at once analytical and comic, a dismantling of true-crime tropes that highlights how genre conventions feed an industry driven more by voyeurism and cliché than by truth. At times the narration overstays its welcome, but there is courage in exposing the mechanics of a genre many consume uncritically.  3/5

Where Shackleton uses form to interrogate narrative itself, Urška Djukić’s Little Trouble Girls (Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Serbia/2025/ 89 mins) uses formal intensity to reframe a familiar genre: the coming-of-age story. Sixteen-year-old Lucija (Jara Sofija Ostan), is a member of her Catholic school’s choir and befriends the charismatic Ana Maria (Mina Švajge). During a convent retreat, her desire is sparked by a worker working there, causing rifts with Maria and the group. The plot may seem traditional, an adolescent sexual awakening under conservative constraint, but Djukić elevates it through sound and image. Close-ups and precise sound design capture female desire with delicacy and intimacy, allowing the body itself to carry the story. Yet the film falters in its ending: magical realism, paired with heavy religious imagery, feels like a convenient device rather than a real question. Moreover, Lucija’s mother, introduced with nuance and real characteristics  early on, disappears from the narrative, reducing family to backdrop. Even so, Djukić demonstrates a bold willingness to explore female bodies with masterful skills. 3/5

From adolescence under Catholic authority, the festival shifted to family relationships strained by accident and morality in Minden Rendben (Growing Down) (Hungary/ 2025/ 85 mins), the debut feature of Bálint Dániel Sós. Shot in luminous black-and-white, the film explores a father–son dynamic, embodied by the brilliant Szabolcs Hajdu and talented Ágoston Sáfrány, after an accident fractures their lives. The cinematography is elegant. Its interiors are charged with subtle mise-en-scène. Yet narratively, the film softens what could have been an unflinching ethical dilemma. By resolving too easily, it undercuts its own complexity, leaving its technical achievements stronger than its moral weight. Still, like Djukić, Sós shows promise: his film gestures toward deeper layers of relationship and responsibility, even if it does not fully excavate them. 3/5

If these debuts wrestled with the family as a private site of conflict, the Dardenne brothers’ Young Mothers (France, Belgium/ 2025/ 105 mins) returned to one of their recurring themes: individuals caught within the structures of a society. Following five women housed in a centre for young mothers, the film examines their varied struggles: addiction, abandonment, strained parental ties, and fragile romantic relationships, while confronting the responsibilities of raising a child and their own future as young adults. Yet where Sós’s film was too kind to its protagonist, the Dardennes risk schematic simplicity: each mother seems defined by their own single problem, and the narrative threads never coalesce into a systemic critique. Compared with their recent work such as Tori and Lokita, Young Mothers feels oddly staged, reducing characters into embodiments of issues rather than flesh-and-blood women navigating their life. 3/5

Eva Libertad’s Deaf (Sorda) (Spain/ 2025/ 99 mins) takes the concerns of family and marginalisation into more specific territory. Centring on Ángela (Miriam Garlo), a deaf mother preparing to raise a child with her hearing husband, the film explores the conflicts that could emerge in families built across different sensory worlds. Its sound design is remarkable, conveying both intimacy and estrangement, and its attention to everyday discrimination is subtle yet piercing. Some external elements, however, feel staged: the sudden contrast between Ángela’s inclusive pre-pregnancy world and the isolations she faces during and after pregnancy, but the film’s handling of her interior life is deft and compassionate. Placed alongside Young Mothers, it reminds us that family and motherhood is never only private, it always reflects something structural about our society. 4/5

The programme also reached backwards, reminding us of cinema’s political legacy. Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ireland, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland/ 2006/ 127 mins), screened after an In Conversation: Ken Loach, Paul Laverty, and Rebecca O’Brien, resonated powerfully in the present political climate. Set during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, it depicts the agonising choices faced by ordinary people caught between loyalty, survival, and principle. The story resists simple binaries: its characters’ decisions often feel devastating but historically inevitable, embodying the complexity of revolution rather than simplifying it into heroism. If at times Loach’s sentimentality shows, the film remains one of his most enduring achievements, reaffirming his place as a master of political storytelling. 4/5

What emerges across these films is a festival concerned with the relationship between individuals and the systems that shape them: Shackleton dismantling narrative conventions; Djukić and Sós probing adolescence and family; the Dardennes and Libertad exploring motherhood as a site of systemic pressure; Loach expanding outward to personal struggle within a historical moment . Taken together, the programme under Ridd and Boa reflects an Edinburgh International Film Festival concerned with the multiple dimensions of film as a medium and committed to pushing the boundaries of storytelling, both aesthetically, politically, and socially.

All film screened as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival