Connery family to open Edinburgh filmmaking centre — SkimNews
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- Sean Connery's family unveiled plans for the NFTS Sean Connery Institute in Edinburgh city centre — a partnership between the Sean Connery Foundation and the National Film and Television School — targeting an opening within the next 18 months.
- The institute will serve as a permanent home for NFTS in Scotland, delivering training, screenings, masterclasses and events aimed at building lasting careers for Scotland's next generation of film and TV talent.
- The Sean Connery Foundation was established in late 2022 and has worked with NFTS since 2023 on the Sean Connery Talent Lab, a year-long development programme for emerging Scottish writers, directors, producers, cinematographers and editors.
- Sean Connery's children said their father "understood that while talent may be distributed equally, opportunity is not" and would have been "immensely proud" they were deepening his relationship with Edinburgh.
- Sir Sean Connery was born in Edinburgh in 1930 and worked as a milkman in the Scottish capital before going on to play James Bond in six films and win an Oscar for The Untouchables; he died in October 2020 in the Bahamas.
- Jason Connery, Sean's son, co-owns First Stage Studio in Edinburgh's Port of Leith, which has hosted productions including the Netflix series Department Q.
Why it matters: Edinburgh gains a permanent NFTS training outpost — its first — tied to a globally recognizable Scottish icon, giving aspiring screen talent a concrete near-term pipeline rather than forcing a relocation to London. The Connery family's coordinated push, spanning the Foundation, the Talent Lab and Jason Connery's Leith studio, ties the late actor's name to an actual industry infrastructure rather than a memorial alone.
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