The box office opened for the world’s oldest continually running film festival on Friday, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which I usually take a week off to enjoy every year. Normally they send me a programme but nothing arrived this year, so on my day off, which coincided with the box office opening, I took myself off to the Filmhouse (long a second home for me in Edinburgh), grabbed the programme, parked myself in the cafe-bar (one of my favourite spots to relax in the city) and worked my way through it, circling the ones I most wanted to see, then checking them against the calendar section to see which ones conflicted with others and then back to the box office to book a whole block.

I’ve got a good mix, as usual, foreign language, animation, drama, documentary. I’ve got both strands of the McLaren Animation Awards, which celebrate the best in new animation talent, with the audience voting for the films showing, so the award goes to the one the actual film fest audiences think best deserves it. I often see some of the McLaren films turn up months later in the BAFTA and Oscars short animation nominations, which is always satisfying. Sadly the festival is about the only place I get to see these shown on the big screen – it’s a pity the tradition of showing a short before the feature film died out long ago, it would be nice if some of these short works got a few screenings in mainstream cinemas, would be a nice way for them to support new talent, even if they only did, say, one month a year where they had them as shorts before the main programme (and since it is all digital now it isn’t like they need expensive prints made and transported to the cinemas). Also on the animation front I’m really looking forward to In This Corner of the World, which the gravepine has been saying is one of the best Japanese animated movies in years.

When I saw Emer Reynolds’ The Farthest in the documentary section, I knew I had to put that one on my slate as well. The Farthest follows one of the greatest journeys of discovery in human history, the magnificent Voyager missions. Rushed into being when astronomers realised that a rare upcoming alignment of many of the planets would give them a unique opportunity, two probes were crafted in quite a short period, incredibly complex courses worked out for something never attempted before, sending a craft on a multi-planet mission. And all of this with early 1970s technology.., Technology which is still working.

After planetary encounters and sending back huge swathes of data on our neighbouring worlds that kept scientists busy for decades, following remarkable courses which used the gravity wells of the planets themselves to alter their routes, Voyager 1 and 2 both then took on a new mission, hurtling outwards to the final frontier, still sending weak signals home, searching for the point where the sun’s influence fades and interstellar space begins. Even then, once all power is gone, they still have on final mission, each carrying a gold disc with multiple-languages and music of the Planet Earth on them, just in case by some astonishing chance they are ever found by another species. A little snapshot of human life and culture that will, most likely, drift forever throughout the universe…