Edinburgh filmmakers premiere new film at Cannes Film Festival

Edinburgh filmmakers who recently won an Award of Excellence statuette are to have their short film, Avaritia premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this week.

Avaritia, directed by Walid Salhab and filmed on the streets of Edinburgh, tells the story of Adam who is trapped in his own world.  He is obsessed by money and has been corrupted by banking institutions.  He is alone and searches for someone to be his companion.  Director, Walid Salhab said, “We live in such a consumer driven society that sometimes we forget the important things in life like health, happiness, family and friends.  The main character in the film views everything and everyone as a way of accumulating more wealth and that’s why he is trapped.”

 The film is a unique blend of stop-motion and live action and is made up of over 9,000 individual photographs to form a haunting and surreal, but ultimately beautiful depiction of love and greed.  The unique filming style was perfected over a three year period especially for this film.  Walid Salhab’s ‘Kinetic’ series on You Tube shows the Director practising the technique.  Kinetic Edinburgh II has now been viewed over three million times.

The film has recently won an Award of Excellence from the prestigious Best Shorts competition in California. Covered in 24k gold the statuette is manufactured by the same company that makes the awards for the Oscars.  Previous winners of this award have gone on to win Oscars.

Leading Actor and Producer, Robert A. Welsh said, “Working on this project has been the hardest film-making experience I have been involved in. To re-create natural movement whilst filming in stop-motion, in temperatures that sometimes reached minus four degrees for hours at a time, in the Scottish winter was extremely difficult.”

 20 year-old model, Sarah Elizabeth Mills, who plays Eve in her first film role said: “It was an experience.  But the end result was worth going through all the cold nights we spent filming.”  Sarah has previously been ‘Face of Edinburgh’ 2013 and first runner up in the ‘Face of Scotland’ award.

Their previous short film, Bra-et Al Rouh 2012, went on to win many Awards and accolades world-wide.