Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema announces 2016 programme

Kirstyn Smith
9 February 2016

Wunder der Schopfung

Festival’s sixth year sees films from China, the USSR, Germany and the US, as well as those closer to home

Scotland’s only silent film festival has announced its 2016 programme. The Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema runs from Wed 16–Sun 20 Mar at venues in and around Bo’ness.

Highlights of this year’s festival include a number of international films, including Polish film Mania: The Story of a Cigarette Factory Worker (a film that was previously thought to be lost for almost a century) with a score from supergroup Czerwie. There’s also Daybreak starring Li Lili, an event supplemented by a tour of Chinese culture and cinema in the 20s and 30s from the University of Edinburgh’s Dr Xuelei Huang. Germany is represented by 1925 tale of passion and betrayal Variety, with a live soundtrack from percussionist Frank Bockius and Stephen Horne.

Unique to this year’s festival is a focus on the unsung female heroines of the silent silver screen. Known as the female Laurel & Hardy, comic actors Anita Garvin and Marion Byron are showcased in their 1929 film A Pair of Tights, while Beatrice Lillie, described by Noël Coward as ‘the funniest woman of our civilisation’, shines in her only lead role in 1926’s Exit Smiling.

As well as a host of exciting films to (re)discover, the festival also features the HippFest Speakeasy, a late night cabaret show with the Bevvy Sisters and the Bad Boys; an outdoor film screening at Bo’ness Railway Station (this year features The Wrecker); and the ever-popular New Found Sound, in which secondary schools across Falkirk perform their own scores to a series of shorts from the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive.

Tickets are on sale from noon on Tue Feb 9.

The Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema runs from 16-20 Mar, various venues: Bo’ness.