Greenpeace on the Beach

Greenpeace had a stall on the Prom at the bottom of our street this afternoon. They were there to highlight the issue of plastic rubbish in our oceans as the Greenpeace ship Beluga II returned to Leith after a two-month research trip around Scotland gathering data on the scale of the problem. I had a bit of a chat with A here and then asked if she minded having her picture taken. Greenpeace are trying to put pressure on Coca Cola, as the largest producer of disposable plastic bottles, to switch to reusable bottles. The 5p charge for plastic bags has had a dramatic impact on the number of plastic bags being thrown away so why couldn't a similar scheme apply to bottles?
Later we went to Cineworld for a couple more films in the Film Festival - this time we had chosen different ones to see. I started with what turned out to be the European premiere of Let Me Go a film about mothers and daughters set against the backdrop of the concentration camps and the Holocaust. Based on an autobiographical book it was interesting to contrast with The Last Photograph, both in the film itself and in the Q&A afterwards. If the The Last Photograph was a man's film then Let Me Go was a woman's film - four leading women and a woman director. Slightly different in that the story the film was based upon was true, rather than already being at one remove as in The Last Photograph, although the filmmaker did add her own elements to tell the story. There were some dialogue and exchanges that seemed a little clunky, especially involving the great-granddaughter and her holiday romance (but maybe that was portraying the naivety of youth), but Let Me Go felt much less entitled and smug in both its telling and in the way the director and cast responded to the Q&A. There was a vaguer dramatic arc - resisting the temptation to have the film be about the discovery of a secret but more an exploration of the relationships involved. Interesting, with good performances from the cast.
And then for my second film of the evening it was another male film - the Dutch language Waterboys. A road movie showing father and son on a visit to Edinburgh. I felt buttons were being pressed - for me the Waterboys will always be the music we listened to coming back down the road from watching Dundee United play European football. Hence there is a nostalgia there, similar to that in the father in the film, and in the film's director - clearly a big fan of the band from his comments in the Q&A. (This was the UK premiere.) Although the film did play with that as the father was stuck in the band's 1980s playlist, while the musician son had followed them into more recent, more interesting work. Lots of funny moments, especially concerning the Edinburgh publisher who had translated the Dutch detective writer's latest book, not into English as he had believed, but into Scots. A lighter film, with romantic involvements for both father and son that put me in mind of Gregory's Girl at times. And the music was good! Interestingly the concert at the end, supposedly in the Kings Theatre, but clearly not when you saw inside the venue, was arranged specially for the film and was shot over two nights in Amsterdam. The venue looks much more like the inside of the Queen's Hall - I wonder they didn't pretend it was happening there?