There's a reason why the Edinburgh Film Festival is changing date – it doesn't cut the mustard

The decision to move the Edinburgh International Film Festival away from its traditional home in August during the omnipresent Edinburgh Festival is a tacit admission that the film festival has become a non-event. Even, dare I say it, a bit of a bore, as the festival organisers have struggled to get innovative pictures or bona fide stars to come to the Scottish capital. Of all the festivals that take place in the city, the film festival has for some years been the most dismal.

The official line is that moving to June will allow the festival to be the "only show in town" and, says its artistic director Hannah McGill, "give us breathing space to expand and create our own distinct identity, allowing us to further develop our reputation as one of the more innovative, cutting-edge and challenging film events".

During the past decade, I've travelled to all the major film festivals as well as some of the more boutique events such as the Amazon Film Festival in Brazil. I've never heard one person outside the promotions team of the Edinburgh Film Festival ever call the event "cutting edge" or "challenging". In fact, it's rare to talk about this film festival at all. The festival lost its edge years ago, and this move has been forced upon the organisers as an attempt to give the film festival some sort of edge.

Edinburgh used to be my favourite film festival. Some of the reasons are personal; it is in the city where I went to university, and it was the first film festival I attended. But, more important, it was where I could see Sean Penn walking down the street and where I could see the best films from Cannes.

It was where I saw Mother and Son by Aleksandr Sokurov, Festen by Thomas Vinterberg and L'Humanité by Bruno Dumont; films that were exceptional or caused controversy or changed the ways films were made. In this year's programme, the only prizewinner from the official Cannes competition is Paranoid Park and that was a special 60th anniversary award to Gus Van Sant that was more in recognition of his contribution to Cannes over the years than for his work on the film.

The failure to get the big films from Cannes in recent years is a reason why it is not such a big deal that the move to June will mean that, in future, Edinburgh will not need to source movies from La Croisette.

One of Edinburgh's big problems has been its proximity to the London Film Festival in October. Film critic Mark Cousins, a former artistic director of the festival, says that distributors would always favour London over Edinburgh because "the LFF was far bigger and has more dosh". He cites David Cronenberg's Crash as a film he lost out on.

The competition from the London Film Festival was always quite friendly and the festival directors would often share out the best films. That was until London decided that its name and anything else was fodder for sponsorship. In return for the huge sums of sponsorship cash, the London organisers are obliged to do all they can to get the best films at their festival.

"People have decided that you can't have two glitzy festivals next to each other," says Cousins, "so maybe it's time Edinburgh stopped trying to be a red-carpet festival and started to be a festival that is more about discovery. Not just about the discovery of the new, but also about gems from the past. It needs to try to look at festivals in a new way and not be a genre festival like London."

McGill, in her first year, plays down the challenge from London. She says: "I was surprised by how little crossover with London there was with the films we want. I'm paid to travel the world to find films that Edinburgh can give a platform to, films that otherwise the public wouldn't see. For example, I saw a film at the South by Southwest Festival, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, that I believe is cutting edge and for which the festival will be a great platform."

There are not enough films that are innovative enough to make the festival stand out and be as exciting as the organisers would like us to believe. Looking in the catalogue, a lot of the film choices seem rather generic. Both the opening-night film, Hallam Foe, and the closing night's Two Days in Paris, will be in cinemas in the blink of an eye. This is also the case for several other high-profile films such as Knocked Up, Sparkle (out today), and Breach. All Edinburgh is doing is allowing people to see these films shortly before they go on general release.

And there are some bizarre programming choices, such as the decision to show The Hottest State as a gala screening. The film, directed by Ethan Hawke, is an adaptation from his novel and some people felt it was the worst film in Venice last year. It's scheduled to go straight to DVD in the UK.

Other lacklustre gala films are the bland comedy Year of the Dog and The Counterfeiters, a very ordinary German film set during the Second World War detailing how Jews in concentration camps were used in a Nazi-sponsored counterfeiting operation. Much has been written about Quentin Tarantino's dull Death Proof, a film that was originally supposed to come out in the UK as one half of Grindhouse back in May.

Despite McGill's wish to champion the small film, all of the gala films are movies with UK distribution deals in place. McGill argues that "the move to June will allow us to put more effort into championing the smaller films. It's hard to do so at the moment many journalists seem only interested in writing about the big films."

Yet if the festival is not apparently prepared to put the cutting-edge films in its best slots, it seems rather churlish to criticise others for not doing the same. If the festival wanted to push In Search of a Midnight Kiss it could have given it more prominence. Other films in the festival that would have made good gala screenings and would have fitted the "cutting-edge" agenda are the traumatic Argentinean hermaphrodite movie XXY and the excellent Spanish thriller Yo.

The rhetoric is that the date move will allow Edinburgh to become the "Sundance of Europe". Yet a repositioning of the festival as the champion of independent cinema is unlikely when the festival organisers say that the format works as it now stands, and proof of this is that 70 per cent of tickets are sold. The only thing "Sundance" this year is the fact that Sundance Film Festival director Geoff Gilmore is jury head.

My concern is that no new championing will take place with the date change and that the move is being done only to give the Edinburgh Film Festival a better chance of finding sponsors. This year the popular open-air Film Festival Under the Stars screenings have been axed because no sponsor could be found. When Edinburgh first opened its doors back in 1947 there were only two festivals to compete with (Cannes and Venice). Now, with more than 2,000 film festivals around the globe, Edinburgh seems increasingly irrelevant to industry professionals.

McGill believes that the June date will allow the festival to have "more industry events". There are those opposed to the date move on the grounds that it ruins the general pan-arts ethos of the festival. But this has long been a fallacy. While those attending the film festival may decide to catch a show or two, those in Edinburgh for the books, TV, dance, comedy, or theatre don't appear to feel the same way about going to see a movie.

I just hope that next year the festival stops being so generic and predictable and makes bold programming choices that will once more make it not only a great place to see new films but also become my favourite film festival again.

Edinburgh International Film Festival (www.edfilmfest. org.uk), to 26 August