The Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), established in 1947, is the world's oldest continually running film festival.

EIFF presents both UK and international films (all titles are World, international, European or UK Premieres), in all genres and lengths. It also presents themed retrospectives and other specialized programming strands.

The Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) originated as the International Festival of Documentary Films and was opened by John Grierson, founder of the British documentary movement. The International Festival of Documentary Films was presented by the Edinburgh Film Guild alongside the 1947 Edinburgh International Festival. Key figures in this initiative were the Guild's Norman Wilson and the film journalist and wartime civil servant, Forsyth Hardy. The second Festival, in 1948, opened with Robert J. Flaherty's Louisiana Story. In 1949, The Festival planned to screen the double Academy Award winner Bicycle Thieves as the highlight of the third Festival but the film was given UK distribution and the distributors pulled it from the Festival.

1952 marked a shift from documentary programming and the festival included Le Plaisir and Death of a Salesman, and the Duke of Edinburgh attended the opening of this sixth Festival. The Festival was expanded in 1954 and showcased films and events at the Cameo cinema and other cinemas around Edinburgh, and John Huston also agreed to serve as Honorary President.

The late Sixties saw Hollywood films showcased, mainly from independent studios, for example AIP. Film critic John Russell, reviewed these changes for the London Times and wrote:

Last year the Edinburgh Film Festival was radically remade: out with drably conservative features and solid documentary, in with Roger Corman, international underground and the young idea. The idea was not only young, but good. By choosing to lay the festival’s main accent on specialist weeks devoted to a particular country or school and on retrospectives of the sort of film-maker rarely so honoured over here, the organizers immediately gave it a new twist, and removed it from the regular rat race, in which too many festivals chase too few films of any real merit

— John Taylor Russell, Edinburgh Goes Pop, The Times (23 August 1969)

Director Murray Grigor recruited two undergraduates at University of Edinburgh, Lynda Myles and David Will, who had written an article published in The Scotsman criticising the Festival's programming as conservative. Wills and Myles were credited bringing influence from French film theory and American cinema. They worked with British theorist and filmmaker Peter Wollen and introduced film retrospectives, educational and publishing events to the festival. Peter Stanfield writes that this changed the festival saying "as of 1968-69 the Festival was no longer a purveyor of middlebrow film fare; from the onwards it would assume an innovative, oppositional face, offering a platform for cultish directors and a window for some of the most exciting developments in international filmmaking." The EIFF was funded by grants from the Scottish Film Council and Edinburgh Cooperation and, at the time, had no industry sponsorship.