Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to EdinburghChoose Life. Choose starting this piece with a quote from the famous opening scene of Trainspotting, in which Ewan McGregor fled through Edinburgh after being caught shoplifting. The sequence became an instant classic. Some traditional corners of the Scottish capital might have also considered that a mixed blessing. A generation of film lovers would now smile fondly every time they thought of Princes Street. The movie also forever linked the city with disreputable junkies and the most inky-black comedy.Still, Edinburgh has always been both this and that: a place of grand Georgian crescents and harder-edged outskirts. Lately, the city has led a cinematic double life too. At the multiplex, it has been a backdrop for Marvel films and the Fast and Furious franchise. F9 brought mayhem to the Royal Mile; Avengers: Infinity War used locations including a fictional fast food joint on Cockburn Street offering to “deep-fry your kebab”. But there have also been all manner of memorable films where the city has been more than just a kebab shop or high-speed mise en scène. Bound up with the essence of Edinburgh itself, those movies are the ones I have brought together here.‘Trainspotting’ (Danny Boyle, 1996)So, yes, is hard to start dealing with Edinburgh in film anywhere but Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s caustic cult novel. That foot chase from Princes Street to Calton Road Bridge was just the beginning of a story steeped in the city, from rundown Leith to the annual festival. (Of which the characters were not fans.) And yet in movies, things are so rarely what they seem. At the risk of shattering illusions, almost everything in the film beyond that opening sequence was actually shot in Edinburgh’s eternal rival: Glasgow.But we can also add a postscript. Two decades years later, Boyle’s follow-up T2 was released. This time, with the success of the first movie deepening the budget’s pockets, most of the film was shot in Edinburgh itself. A location tour duly included Arthur’s Seat, the scenic cobbles of the Old Town, and even the Scottish Parliament. Oh, and Calton Road Bridge too — all parties having come a long way since the first film, before ending up back where they started. Where to watch: Apple TV, BFI Player‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ (Ronald Neame, 1969)The great and singular Scottish novelist Muriel Spark was nothing if not a product of Edinburgh. At the age of 18, she was working in the back office of a lavish department store on Princes Street. Before that, there had been an education at what was then James Gillespie’s School for Girls, where among the staff was the mercurial school teacher who would inspire her best-known novel: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.The 1969 film adaptation saw Maggie Smith needing to adopt an accent, though her mother was Scottish. But the city around her was the real thing. Grassmarket and Greyfriars Kirkyard Cemetery took notable roles, with the fictional Brodie living on Admiral Terrace in Spark’s old stamping ground in Bruntsfield. (In the one tweak made to urban reality, to properly capture the 1930s setting every TV aerial in sight had to be manually removed.) Where to watch: DVD‘The Illusionist’ (Sylvain Chomet, 2010)Love at first sight does happen: The Illusionist is proof. In 2003, French animator Sylvain Comet arrived at the Edinburgh Film Festival to promote his cult breakthrough Belleville Rendez-Vous. The director was so instantly smitten, he then relocated from Paris to live and work in the city. He also brought a project with him — an unmade script by French comic maestro Jacques Tati. Chomet reimagined the story of a hapless magician and the young woman who believes in his gifts twice over. First, he made it an animation; next, he changed the setting from Prague to 1950s Edinburgh. The city was instantly familiar even at half a century’s distance, grand department stores and dusty theatres overlooked by Edinburgh Castle, the genteel and elemental side by side. As with so many grand affairs, Chomet and Edinburgh would eventually part. Some years later, he moved to Provence. But the film remains an ardent billet-doux.Where to watch: Amazon Prime US ‘Hallam Foe’ (David Mackenzie, 2007)Glasgow-based director David Mackenzie is a chameleon behind the camera. His 2016 neo-Western Hell or High Water, for instance, unfolded to great effect in west Texas. But he made an early career splash with Hallam Foe, a skewed story of peeping tom-hood starring Jamie Bell as the teenager of the title, newly arrived in Edinburgh to relentlessly observe the city around him. Those voyeuristic tendencies gave the film endless opportunity to join in, of course. Positioned on the rooftops with binoculars, Hallam duly casts his eye over landmarks including Waverley station and Princes Street Garden, all wrapped up in this, the Edinburgh answer to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Where to watch: DVD ‘Sunshine on Leith’ (Dexter Fletcher, 2013)Queen and Elton John would both come to be the subject of jukebox musicals made by director Dexter Fletcher. Before Rocket Man or Bohemian Rhapsody, however, there was Sunshine on Leith: Fletcher’s feelgood romp based around the songs of The Proclaimers, and set in the Edinburgh home of twin singer-songwriters Craig and Charlie Richards. The story finds a pair of young Scottish soldiers returned from military service in Afghanistan, where one falls for an Englishwoman, of all things. But of course the plot was only ever a pretext to showcase the songs — not least a climax involving 500 extras, choreographed on The Mound. Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon PrimeThe Bill Douglas Trilogy (Bill Douglas, 1972–78)The Edinburgh you see in the first three of the four films made by Bill Douglas (My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home) is physically the same city as any other in this selection. Arthur’s Seat can appear in the background of a shot; a car will slowly climb Mound Place by Princes Street Gardens. But in spirit, they are some distance from the singalong sweetness of a Sunshine in Leith: a trilogy of stark, semi-autobiographical portraits of a young boy growing up in the destitution of postwar mining village Newcraighall, just a few miles from central Edinburgh. Even now, the films still influence key British directors such as Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay. Douglas and his Edinburgh are part of the very fabric of UK cinema. Where to watch: Tank TV, Blu-ray/DVD‘Shallow Grave’ (Danny Boyle, 1994)Two years before Trainspotting, Danny Boyle made another film in the Scottish capital that some would say was actually an even better Edinburgh movie also starring Ewan McGregor (I’m one of them). Shallow Grave was the dark-souled story of a trio of young professional flatmates slipping into crime in a well-appointed pad on the corner of Royal Circus. And the opening sequence grabbed the attention just as hard. While McGregor later pounded Princes Street on foot, here the grand crescents of the New Town swept by in a hyper-accelerated car journey. “This could have been any city,” his voiceover said, but that wasn’t strictly true. Socially as much as geographically, the whole movie was a very Edinburgh affair. And yet there was one more link to Trainspotting we should probably admit for the sake of the record. Whisper it, but again, this most Edinbronian of films was mostly shot in Glasgow . . . Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime Tell us about your favourite Edinburgh-set films in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
