Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio will premiere at the 66th Edinburgh International Film Festival, and will be competing for the prestigious Michael Powell Award. The film's premiere is 28 June.

Berberian Sound Studio, the sophomore feature film from Peter Strickland (Katalin Varga), starring award-winning actor Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) who plays a shy and naive sound designer from Dorking.

An Illuminations Films and Warp X production, the film is produced by Keith Griffiths (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) and Mary Burke (Submarine, Bunny and The Bull) with Nic Knowland BSC as the cinematographer and edited by Academy Award winner Chris Dickens.

The film is Co-Produced by Hans Geißendörfer. Co-developed and co-financed by Film4 & UK Film Council, and made in association with Screen Yorkshire and GEIßENDÖRFER FILM UND FERNSEHPRODUKTION KG. 

Synopsis

1976: Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound pro- cessed and sharpened in this studio. Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a naive and introverted sound engineer from England is hired to orchestrate the sound mix for the latest film by horror maestro, Santini (Antonio Mancino). Thrown from the innocent world of local documentaries into a foreign environment fuelled by exploitation, Gilderoy soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actresses, capricious technicians and confounding bureaucracy. The longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams and the bloodcurdling sounds of hacked vegetables, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio in his hometown of Dorking. His mother’s letters alternate between banal gos- sip and an ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini’s film. As both time and realities shift, Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem, and has to confront his own demons in order to stay afloat in an environment ruled by exploitation both on and off screen.

Berberian Sound Studio will be premiered on 28 June at Filmhouse 1 at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012. Tickets will be available to buy, from 31 May at 10am, from the Festival website. 

Original soundtrack by Broadcast to be released on Warp Records. More information on the screening on the Edinburgh International Film Festival website.