May 1992

Edinburgh’s Filmhouse is showing the late Terence Davies wonderful The Long Day Closes. The film is a both a hymn to childhood and a love letter to film itself.

On the front page of the Filmhouse programme there is a still from the film, the eleven-year-old Bud (played by Leigh McCormack) caught in the light of the projector as he leans over the front row of the cinema’s balcony. Below the image, we read:

This month Filmhouse inaugurates its new sound system in Cinema 1 as part of a continuous programme of improvement of the standard of film presentation. The Dolby Stereo system has been upgraded and new speakers installed so that Filmhouse can play Dolby SR (Spectral Recording) films and give an appreciably better quality of reproduction of all soundtracks, including those on 70mm prints. (Equipment of this standard has been installed at only one other cinema in the UK).

The Long Day Closes is one of the first films to be shown using the new sound installation. The programme goes on to ‘gratefully acknowledge contributions to date towards the cost of these improvements’ from several Edinburgh based corporate sponsors.

One of those sponsors is a company called Caledonian Heritable Ltd.

Salvatore Cascio as Salvatore 'Totò' Di Vita in Cinema Paradiso

June 2025

Edinburgh’s much loved Filmhouse opens its doors to the public this week for the first time since October 2022, when the cinema’s previous operator collapsed into administration. The ‘coming soon’ posters around the city advertising the re-opening, promise ‘a sequel better than the original’. I can’t put into words how much I am looking forward to going back. There may even be a tear in my eye when the lights are dimmed, the famous red curtains are pulled back and the credits start to roll for the first time. I’m sure I won’t be the only one.

The opening film is - of course - Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso. Like The Long Day Closes, it is a hymn to childhood and a love letter to film. There could be no better choice.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece for Bella Caledonia about the demise of the old Filmhouse. I wrapped it up by saying that one of my earliest Filmhouse memories was from 1988 when I was introduced to Italian cinema via Cinema Paradiso and how I’d seen it again some 30 years later as part of a ‘Filmosophy’ series, an exploration of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave along with Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Truman Show with Jim Carey. It was the sort of thing the Filmhouse did so well, made it so special, made it more than somewhere that just showed films.

When I wrote that, the only information in the public domain was that the Filmhouse building, the former United Associate Synod Church at 88 Lothian Road, used as a cinema for over 40 years, had been sold to Caledonian Heritable Ltd., operator of bars and hotels including The Dome in George Street and Archerfield Estate in East Lothian. I definitely wasn’t alone in thinking that the chances of the Filmhouse ever operating as a cinema again seemed remote. I finished on a gloomy note:

Cinema Paradiso is a love story, the love that the small Sicilian village Giancaldo has for its local cinema. When the Paradiso burns down it rises from the ashes as the Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, the rebuilding paid for by one of the villagers. Of course, there’s much more to the film than that – deservedly it won a raft of industry awards including the Academy Award for Best foreign Language Film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix – but it would be lovely to think that a New Filmhouse can be saved from the mess that has been left.

Alas, it seems unlikely. The film alludes to this too: towards the end, when a grown up Salvatore returns home village for the funeral of Alfredo, the projectionist who inspired him to a career in the film industry, he discovers that the Cinema Paradiso is to be demolished. Demolished in the name of progress: to make way for a car park.

As Alfredo says, “Life isn’t like in the movies. Life is much harder.”

The Filmhouse Dream Team’ Ginnie Atkinson, James Rice, Rod White and David Boyd. Image courtesy Edinburgh Filmhouse

However, against all the odds, and proof that life is much harder than in the movies, four people have changed the ending of the film for Edinburgh’s Cinema Paradiso. Ginnie Atkinson, James Rice, Rod White, and David Boyd - all four former employees of the old Filmhouse - were determined that Filmhouse should live to see another day. Between them they have years of experience in cinema operations, administration, programming, and arts funding. If you had to pick four people who had a chance of saving Filmhouse, this was them. They are the dream team, and they deserve our thanks for their hard work and perseverance.

But, without being able to lease the building from its new owners, there still would be no Filmhouse reopening this week. In an article in the Edinburgh Inquirer, Caledonian Heritable’s owner Kevin Doyle explains “We felt it was important that Edinburgh maintained a long-standing Filmhouse, having the facility to train individuals…as well as showing new films and profiling new scriptwriters, directors, producers and their work.”

It wasn’t complete chance that I found that old Filmhouse programme. I’d recently rewatched The Long Day Closes which sparked a memory of there being some new equipment being installed in the cinema at the time of its release, I could even visualise the front page of the programme with its pale blue print. A morning at the National Library of Scotland confirmed that I can at least still remember the trivial matters in life. Caledonian Heritable’s association with Filmhouse now stretches back well over 30 years and the lease in place secures the cinema for the next 25 years. Clearly Kevin Doyle’s love of cinema runs deep, and he deserves our thanks too.

Filmhouse: The Return

Love Or Duty