Although it wasn’t founded specifically for that reason in 2010, one advantage of CineFringe (tagline: ‘The official film festival of the Edinburgh Fringe’) is that it brings a film presence back to August in Edinburgh, ever since the International Film Festival’s controversial move to a June time slot. The scale is much smaller than the EIFF, naturally, but still impressive: over 20 days three themed groups of shorts are screened three times each at the Sweet venue on the Grassmarket, with a ‘best of’ night at the end and a separate one-off compilation screening in collaboration with Summerhall. In total that’s 26 shorts over 11 screenings, plus opening and awards parties.

The films are selected from an international open submission process, with 45 countries represented at a selection level of 512 actually in the festival. ‘We’ve got a film about a mutant crab which rides a horse, which is fairly mind-blowing,’ says founder John Lynch, as well as 'two dramas from the UK and Germany which are amongst the best we’ve ever seen, and a film from Iran we’re very lucky to have given the difficulty in getting art out of the country.’

‘I see CineFringe as being the middle ground between a regular film festival and the spontaneous, edgy feel of the Fringe,’ he says, with ‘that sense of experimentation and of seeing new things. A lot of our filmmakers are people who are getting into it for the first time and working under extraordinarily tight budget constraints. We want to give them the first step on the ladder.’ The hope for the future, he says, is that they can facilitate more Fringe film events in future, even as their own programme grows.

Sweet Grassmarket and Summerhall, 17–26 Aug, cinefringe.com