The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival returned for its 14 edition from Wednesday 20 - Sunday 24 March 2024!

Our 2024 festival screened 18 feature films and 24 short films in the Hippodrome Cinema, as well as talks, workshops, excursions and our popular Platform Reels at Kinneil Railway. We began the festival with our community screening at Barony Theatre on the Saturday before the festival. Our online programme HippFest at Home offered 5 live streamed events during the festival (two talks and three features) as well as three pre-festival presentations in the months leading up to the festival.

Highlights of the programme included the glitzy Friday Night Gala screening of Mantrap (1926), the Audience Award-winning community screening of The Flying Scotsman (1929) at the Barony Theatre; Maud Nelissen’s jazz age accompaniment to Our Dancing Daughters (1928); and Scottish director Frank Lloyd’s Oliver Twist (1922), starring Jackie Coogan and Lon Chaney, with musical accompaniment from Neil Brand.  The premiere of a new score from Shetland musicians Inge Thomson and Catriona Macdonald for Scottish filmmaker Jenny Gilbertson’s (née Brown) The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1933), saw an audience over 340 enjoying it in person and online, making it the largest audience the cinema has seen since the early twentieth century.