A survivor's guide

The longest continuously running film festival in the world opens next Wednesday evening. First up is the young Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's exhilarating Morvern Callar, featuring an extraordinary performance from Samantha Morton as a young woman finding freedom on her own terms by posing as the author of her dead boyfriend's novel.

Over the next dozen nights the same event will see eagerly anticipated new films from the likes of Mike Leigh to Catherine Breillat and Abbas Kiarostami; glamorous visitors including Monica Bellucci, Terence Stamp and Heather Graham; and everything from the latest Japanese horrors to Sweden's Sixties new wave. Yes, in its 56th year, the Edinburgh International Film Festival seems in fairly buoyant health.

Look beneath the surface, however, and there's still the same struggle to put together an international-class programme on relatively modest resources, an unending battle to compete in the crowded film-festival calendar.

Although Edinburgh's mid-August placement allows for selections from the Cannes fortnight each May (that's where Ramsay had her world premiere), it's followed in early September by the seductive presence of the Venice Film Festival, still a magnet for the most significant premieres (among them Magdalena Sisters, the latest from Glasgow's Peter Mullan, which Scottish audiences would certainly have been keen to see). Meanwhile, Edinburgh has an annual slugfest with November's London Film Festival over the choicest world cinema pickings, a contest in which the English heavyweight punches more tellingly than its Scottish rival.

So why – if the organisers have to gnash their teeth over the films they can't get before they start trumpeting the ones they can – is Edinburgh still Britain's most essential film festival experience? Well, any such event ought to be something more than just a lot of films on a lot of screens, and it certainly helps that Edinburgh in August is a genuinely festive spot.

The movie component may be a relatively small part of the overall cultural whirlwind, but if you can forget the temptation to take a machete to the leafleters, human statues and saddos in jester hats clogging the streets, you can't deny that the joint is jumping. The film festival itself is intimate enough to take advantage, often blurring the divide between film-makers and audience in a haze of post-screening drinks parties at the Filmhouse or Cameo cinema bar. Having been pretty much every year since 1985 I could be biased; yet somehow Edinburgh seems more manageable than the London Film Festival, where the celluloid equivalent of carpet bombing merely sends the indecisive running for cover.

In fact, the most radical move by Shane Danielsen, the Australian film critic who is the new artistic director this year, is to reduce the film festival from 15 days to 12. Given that he takes charge at a time when the astute selections made by his predecessor, Lizzie Francke, had left Edinburgh's international reputation on a high, he's wise to concentrate his energies on a more compact timeframe. Box-office is already up by 20 per cent on last year, but then it needs to be, since the demise of FilmFour as we currently know it leaves Edinburgh without a principal sponsor at the end of the 2002 event. Since the FilmFour deal provided 25 per cent of overall sponsorship, and Edinburgh is more reliant on sponsorship than box-office income, there's definitely a cloud on the horizon for a tightly-budgeted festival where 105 of the 185 staff are unpaid volunteers. Edinburgh has always bustled its way through like The Little Film Festival That Could, but 2002 definitely needs to impress – preferably a new major sponsor.

At first glance, it looks an eminently respectable bunch of films. Where it looks slightly thin, however, is in the on-stage interviews, which in recent years have often provided the highlights. True, there's a deserved moment in the spotlight for Anne Coates, the esteemed British editor who's worked on everything from Lawrence of Arabia to Soderbergh's groovy Out of Sight, but it's not quite the same tingle factor of Sean Penn and family gracing your city as they did last year.

Indeed, several of the forthcoming interview slots are devoted to talent as much from the pop field as the movies (the DJ/soundtrack dude David Holmes, Radiohead's visual stylist Dilly Gent), which prompts the thought that Mirrorball, the festival's admired pop promo section, should perhaps become an event in itself. Mild carping aside, though, there's still plenty to be getting on with, and to help you find a through-line, might we humbly suggest a few viewing strategies?

It might involve a bit of queuing for returns, but you could try for the very hottest tickets. Irreversible, the talk of Cannes and already a hot potato for the new British film censor because of its head-crunching violence and nine-minute rape sequence, definitely fits that category, and the director Gaspar Noe and leading lady Monica Bellucci will be on hand to explain themselves. Rather more of a humanist proposition is Rabbit-Proof Fence, which examines Australia's former practice of removing half-caste Aboriginal children from their homes and placing them with white families. Following the plight of three children who walk a thousand miles across country back to their natural mother, it could so easily have been played as a true-life tearjerker, but Phillip Noyce's restrained handling allows the shocking facts to reverberate long after the closing shot frames two of the elderly survivors today.

Elsewhere, one of the names to drop on the festival circuit this year (if you can pronounce it) has been Zeki Demirkubuz, and there are two of the Turkish film-maker's beautifully controlled dramas – The Confession, a portrait of a disintegrating marriage, and Fate, a loose variation on Camus's The Outsider. Or you might even want to try and get in there first for the world premiere of East is East director Damien O'Donnell's second feature, Heartlands, a jaunty Britcom about lost love and a Blackpool darts tournament.

Alternatively, why not go for the films you know you'll never, ever get the chance to see again. Inevitably, this means taking a bit of a flier, but gut instinct and hints from colleagues suggests that the Korean chick-flick Take Care Of My Cat is a bit of a sweetie, and the tough-as-nails Hungarian youth pic Pleasant Days is pleasurably grim. Detained, an inside look at the daily lives of Palestinian women in Israeli-occupied Hebron, is among the sobering but worthwhile selections in Edinburgh's reliably impressive documentary section.

Actually, the Japanese films are so strong this year that you could stick to them alone, with All About Lily Chou-Chou and Go taking different approaches (the first hypnotically expansive, the second hyper-kinetic) to disaffected youth; Hideo Ring Nakata back with another chiller in Dark Water (ever wondered about your neighbour in the flat upstairs?); and the Kon Ichikawa retrospective, centred around the famously harrowing late Fifties anti-war movies The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain.

The top Edinburgh Film Festival tip, though, is to keep yourself free for the final day, Sunday 25 August. That's when virtually every screen is filled with their Best of the Fest selection, programmed in response to audience and critical reaction, and usually spot-on. This year's lot is announced on Sunday 18 August and tickets go on sale a day later. You can "do" the film festival in a day, and leave cinematically sated. Perhaps even a little bit smug...

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