Aftersun, Charlotte Wells’ critically acclaimed debut feature film will open the 75th edition of Edinburgh International Film Festival. Aftersun won a Critics’ Week Award during this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Aftersun tells the story of Sophie (played as an adult by Celia Rowlson-Hall and a young girl by Frankie Corio) who reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father (Paul Mescal) twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between miniDV footage as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t.

Filmmaker Charlotte Wells has said “As a teenager, I spent just about all the money I had saved each summer on tickets to EIFF, sitting on the floor at Fountainbridge in hour long queues for box office opening, leafing through the weighty program which offered my first exposure to independent and international cinema. In 2006, I bought tickets to the Duplass brothers’ The Puffy Chair based on its inch-square picture and synopsis. The Q&A that followed made clear how explicit the connection between filmmakers and their work could be; what personal filmmaking could be. In 2006, I attended the opening night film: The Flying Scotsman. In 2022, I’ll attend again. Edinburgh is home and so is the EIFF. I can’t wait.”