The 74th edition of the festival will be a celebration of cinema, as it emerges "from the darkness of the pandemic", but the programming will be in person and online.

In the selection of short films will be "The Shift", by Laura Carreira, and "Nha Mila" by Denise Fernandes.

For Laura Carreira, who lives and works in the UK, it will be a return to the festival where in 2019 she received the "Youth New Visions" award for her first work, "Red Hill".

Now she performs with "The Shift", which had an international premiere in 2020 at the Venice Film Festival. It is a film that records, in less than ten minutes, the devastation a woman goes through after realizing, at a supermarket queue, that she has lost her job.

THE SHIFT by Laura Carreira (2020) – trailer

The director, who was born in Porto in 1994, traveled to Scotland in 2012 to study Cinema, coinciding at the time with the economic crisis that hit Portugal.

She is currently developing her next film, her first feature, which will feature Portuguese co-production by Bro Cinema and British co-production by Sixteen Films, producer Ken Loach.

"Nha Mila", which premiered in 2020 at the Locarno festival, has been present in more than a dozen festivals.

The film "follows Salomé's four-hour stopover in Lisbon as she travels to Cape Verde to see her dying brother, after 14 years away from his homeland", reads the synopsis.

Denise Fernandes was born in Lisbon in 1990, to Cape Verdean parents, and grew up in Switzerland.

The Edinburgh Film Festival starts on 18 August and ends on the 25 August.