In diplomatic circles it is said that a newly independent nation's first acquisition is an airline and its second, a film festival. The popular idea of a film festival is that of a glittering period of two to three weeks of important films, important people in evening dress, and important awards – a magical time when the cinema and its denizens come within hem-touching distance of ordinary mortals. A film playing to near-empty houses as part of a season on Yugoslav cinema can become, within a film festival, a focus of adulation or condemnation, a source of journalistic copy, an event.

There are today in excess of 250 film festivals throughout the world, and the number is rising. Most function mainly or exclusively within the popular idea of a film festival and it is becoming more difficult, from year to year, entirely to eschew this idea. More arguably, it may not be desirable for any given festival to hold itself apart from the popular idea, but embracing it exacts a heavy price.

This has not always been so, as the history of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) demonstrates. The impetus for its being set up in 1947 – only Venice and Cannes predate it – was not, as the tendency is nowadays, to confer prestige on the Festival's locality and to attract tourists. The thrust behind Edinburgh's creation was a passion for cinema, and more, a politics of cinema, the wish to advance the collective interest in certain cinematic forms and institutions, and to create knowledge and debate about them. The key figures in the group which set Edinburgh up were Norman Wilson (1906–87) and Forsyth Hardy (1910–94), both of whom had been active in Scottish film culture in the decade and a half prior to 1947 as film journalists, members of the Edinburgh Film Guild and, in Hardy's case, as a wartime civil servant in charge of documentary film production in Scotland. Hardy's film column in The Scotsman newspaper, the journal Cinema Quarterly, edited by Wilson, and the exhibition activities of the Edinburgh Film Guild were important in raising film consciousness in quite diverse ways in 1930s Scotland.