Starring Jonny Lee Miller as Obree along with Scottish actors Billy Boyd, Brian Cox and Laura Fraser, the film is the closing gala screening of the fourth Inverness Film Festival and has been nominated for five Scottish BAFTA awards.

The festival begins on Thursday evening with "The Last King of Scotland", one of seven Scottish and two UK premieres to be seen over the four days of the festival.

Based on the novel by Giles Foden and a hit at the London Film Festival, the gala screening is the first chance for an audience outside London to see Forest Whitaker in the role of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and James McAvoy, from Channel 4's "Shameless" and "The Chronicles of Narnia", as the young Scot who becomes a close advisor.

1970s Uganda is not the only exotic location among the 15 films which will be seen at Eden Court cinema's temporary home next to Inverness Floral Hall or the Vue multiplex.

With the subtitle "Distant Worlds" festival programmers Matt Lloyd, Hi-Arts Rural Cinema North co-ordinator, and Paul Taylor, Eden Court's cinema programmer, have selected films from societies as far apart as Australia's Aborigines, Greenland's Innuit and the Pamir Kirghiz tribe from Central Asia, who provide the festival with its most distinctive title "37 Uses for a Dead Sheep".

Running alongside them are films from closer to home with "The Brothers" (1947) and "Play Me Something" (1989) both from the Hebrides. The older film has an interest for "Flying Scotsman" director Mackinnon which goes beyond the cinematic - the Skye-born film-maker's parents met while working as extras on "The Brothers."

"The Edinburgh and Glasgow Film Festivals both look outwards, but we've given ourselves a more specifically Scottish brief,” Lloyd said.

However, the programmers believe there are close ties between the films from Scotland and some of the more exotic offerings, with strands dealing with cultures often regarded as peripheral.

"A s the UK's most northerly film festival, we felt Inverness's programme should reflect the values of the Highlands, whether through revisiting classic local films or through selecting international titles set in remote and dramatic locations, in which ancestry and storytelling are to the fore,” Lloyd continued.

"Films from varied and distant worlds demonstrate a common sense of humanity which is, after all, the most important message cinema can offer."

The Hebrides are also represented in an event on Saturday night which combines archive film with live music.

"The Island Tapes", which can be seen at the Ramada Jarvis Hotel from 8pm, screens five silent films shot in the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland in the 1920s and 1930s to a live performance led by composer and guitarist David Allison and featuring Gaelic singer Alyth McCormack and classical musician Allan Neave. The performance has been seen at Glasgow's Celtic Connections and Edinburgh Festival Fringe along with tours to Germany and the Baltic States, but a one-off appearance by fiddler David Crichton will make the Inverness performance a unique event.

Forest Whitaker as dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland"

"It's beautiful with live Gaelic singing and layered loops of sound. It's a great combination of traditional music and modern techniques and really brings these old films to life,” Lloyd said.

There is also an educational element to the festival and a series of workshops and masterclasses on Saturday will see award-winning editor Mark Jenkins give an introduction to film editing, while David Smith, former executive producer of the Cineworks funding scheme, gives tips to aspiring film makers on how they should pitch and package their production for potential funders.

The festival weekend will also be followed by a screenwriting course held over two weekends and led by Eleanor Yule, writer and director of Peter Mullan film "Blinded."

Meanwhile, Highlanders who have already taken their first steps into film making will get a chance to see their offerings on the big screen when the six finalists of the Digital Eden short film project are screened on Saturday afternoon.

As for their own top tips for the festival, Taylor opts for "10 Canoes", the first film shot in an indigenous Australian Aboriginal language, and "The Journals of Knud Rasmussen", set among the Inuit.

"That's mainly because they come from two very different cultures,” he explained.

"I'll go for the Hebridean double bill of 'The Brother' and 'Play Me Something',” Taylor added. "'The Brothers especially is a little seen film that's a dark riposte to the more popular 'I Know Where I'm Going', which is also set in the Hebrides."

The film festival will return next year when a switch to Eden Court Theatre with its two new purpose built cinemas is likely to see a bigger range of films than ever before, along with the Scottish BAFTA awards ceremony which comes to Inverness for the first time.

c.macleod@inverness-courier.co.uk

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