EIF "Puzzle" Opening Night Gala,Director, Marc Turtletaub, and actress, Kelly Macdonald

A wonderful performance by Kelly Macdonald provides the extraordinary heart and soul to Puzzle, a delightful film about a woman who achieves her potential after a lifetime of looking after others rather than concentrating on herself. Charming, funny, delicate and brimming with a heart-warming sense of honesty, Puzzle is a gentle gem of a film.

Directed with real compassion by Marc Turtletaub, producer of Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Loving (2016), the film opens beautifully as Agnes (Macdonald) is shown readying her house for a birthday party. Everyone is having fun, before Agnes emerges with a large, lit, birthday cake. The irony is that it is her birthday. Agnes’s life is very small, but the opening of one gift containing a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle changes all of that.

Agnes discovers she is a natural at puzzles: a quick worker who can see patterns and is innately good at maths. She escapes her stifling blue-collar life – and husband (David Denman, from The Office) and two sons – and heads to New York to find a shop specialising in jigsaw puzzles. From there, she ends up meeting Robert (a charismatic Irrfan Khan), a champion puzzler who needs a new puzzle partner for a national competition. Agnes starts to come of age in so many ways, becoming the woman she always had the potential to be.

EIFPuzzleOpeningNightGalaAustin AbramsBubba WeilerDaniel ShermanDavid DenmanEdinburgh International Film FestivalKelly MacdonaldOpening Night Gala