When Nora Fingscheidt received a copy of The Outrun, she was living with her husband and young family in Los Angeles. The German director had graduated from her 2019 break-out hit System Crasher to working with Sandra Bullock on the post-jail drama The Unforgivable. But when she read Scottish writer Amy Liptrot’s memoir, it touched a nerve. ‘It hit me during a phase of my life, and in a place, where I was very homesick. I was missing Europe. I was missing some sort of solitude, and it really moved me so much for many reasons. The brutal honesty about Amy’s story, but also the place and her family story.’

Liptrot’s fractured autobiography chronicles both her bleak days in London, when an addiction to alcohol took hold, and her recovery on the Orkney Islands, where her religious mother and mentally unstable father lived. In Fingscheidt’s adaptation, she’s renamed Rona and played by the brilliant Saoirse Ronan, who was attached as both producer and star when Fingscheidt signed on. ‘Knowing that Saoirse would play the character made it very promising. Not everybody can pull it off to have enough presence to hold a film. That is half the film, just herself on the remote island.’

Replicating the book’s expressionistic structure, The Outrun unsparingly depicts the grip of alcoholism. ‘What we were trying to bring across with the film is how difficult it is to be sober,’ notes Fingscheidt. ‘When you’re an alcoholic and you really deal with that disease, then it’s not enough to be three months sober, six months sober . . . from the outside, when you don’t deal with alcoholism, it’s very easy to say “come on, you’re sober now four months, that’s great! Now get a life: do something!” But it’s still one day at a time, and you really have to learn to find joy in life.’

Far removed from LA, filming on the remote Orkney Islands was both ‘crazy and fantastic’, says Fingscheidt. ‘We knew that nature would be its own character in the film. It’s a film about a woman and a place, and so we had to adapt to nature’s rules.’ This meant the production visited Orkney four times. ‘First in April when the lambs are being born. Then we had to come again in June when the birds are nesting in the cliffs. And then our main shoot was in September when the seals are there to swim with. Then we had to go one more time to catch some snow in February.’

Included in the shoot was a move from Orkney’s main island to the tiny, remote and very windswept Papa Westray. ‘We almost doubled the number of inhabitants on the island,’ says Fingscheidt. The island’s only hostel had just 12 beds, but with 30 crew members to house, the locals took them in. ‘We lived in their houses, in their backyards, guest houses. And we grew together, like a big family. It was very exciting for the island, very different to the routine that’s usually there, which is calm and peaceful.’

After receiving its British premiere at Edinburgh, Fingscheidt is planning to hold a screening back on Papa Westray. With the film featuring a number of non-professional Orcadian actors, including AA members glimpsed in Rona’s meetings, she calls it a ‘blur between fiction and documentary’. Whatever the case, you can imagine the tourist trade might be given a boost once the film opens in the UK at the end of September. While Fingscheidt moved her family back to Germany, there’s a glint in her eye every time she talks about Orkney. ‘It’s quite magical.’

The Outrun, Cameo Picturehouse, 15 August, 8.45pm, 9pm; Summerhall, 16 August, 12.30pm; 50 George Square, 16 August, 4pm, as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival; in cinemas on general release from 27 September.