George MacKay Stars in Paul Wright's 'Mission' at Edinburgh
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- Paul Wright's film "Mission," starring George MacKay as an alienated man who pursues increasingly extreme experiences in a bid to evade death, will world premiere in competition at Edinburgh International Film Festival, with Rosy McEwen co-starring as his estranged sister Claire.
- "Mission" is backed by BBC Film, Screen Scotland, and Ffilm Cymru Wales with National Lottery funding, produced as a co-production between Early Day Films and 65 Wilding Films, with Blue Finch Films handling worldwide sales and producers Kate Byers, Linn Waite, Alex Thiele, Marie-Elena Dyche, and Lowri Roberts.
- Wright drew inspiration from performance artists Chris Burden and Marina Abramović, Dadaism, and the alternative music he discovered growing up in a small Fife village, describing outsider figures like them as "modern-day shamans" willing to disturb accepted patterns.
- The film reunites Wright and MacKay more than a decade after their debut collaboration "For Those in Peril," which premiered at Cannes Critics' Week; Wright said MacKay "would give us his all."
- "Mission" was shot in and around Glasgow in 2024, with Wright foregrounding the city as a specifically Scottish setting he describes as having "a character of its own."
- Wright frames the film as moving "vertically" into Dylan's psyche, where memory, dreams, fear, imagination, and reality merge into "different streams of consciousness within a single character," an approach shaped by his 2017 archive documentary "Arcadia."
Why it matters: Wright's first narrative feature in over a decade premieres at one of Britain's most-watched festival competitions — a high-risk, non-linear artistic bet that the director himself admits "is not conventional," with Blue Finch Films attached for worldwide sales and BBC Film publicly backing the project.
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