Edinburgh Film festival guests got the 68th edition of the festival underway in style last night at the city’s ever-impressive National Museum of Scotland.

Guests included the cast and crew of opening film Hyena, including director Gerard Johnson, actors Peter Ferdinando, Stephen Graham and Elisa Lasowski and producers Stephen Woolley, Elizabeth Karlsen and Joanna Laurie.

Treading the red-carpet were America Ferrera and her husband, fellow filmmaker Ryan Piers Williams, ahead of their premiere of X/Y, and more familiar faces including Noel Clarke, Mark Cousins, Kevin Guthrie, Alex Kapranos, Gary Lewis, Martin Compston and Paul Laverty.

If guests left the tough but impressive opening film a little shell-shocked, it didn’t take long for the party mood to take hold with revellers dancing to a playlist devised by director Johnson and his Hyena collaborator and brother Matt Johnson, front-man of post-punk band The The.

The photo-booth drew a long queue throughout the night as locally inspired drinks flowed and the party continued into the night under the watchful gaze of looming dinosaurs.

Earlier in the night, producer Woolley told a packed Edinburgh Festival Theatre audience: “It’s fantastic to be in Edinburgh 30 years after premiering The Company of Wolves here. Over my career many of my films have played here and I’m just as proud tonight for Hyena as I was for any of those films.”

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