I absented myself from this afternoon's screening of Fritz Lang's 1931 thriller M  to enjoy the current heatwave but I sacrificed sun for cinema yesterday.

First on the agenda was a set of seven short films grouped under the title Where's Your Skirt? That was in fact a line plucked from one of the films. It was not altogether representative of the group though four were about girls and one featured a boy in a negligée. I guess it just appealed to the programmer.  Brief notes so I don't forget.  They were all well crafted and interesting whether lighthearted or serious. 

Winter with Umma - Thirty year old still a student in Edinburgh while her brother is getting married back home in Korea. Can a visit from her mum help her into adulthood whatever that is?

Salt and Sauce - A girl unhappily stuck helping in the family chip shop while friends escape to college or the big bad world.  She likes taking photographs.  A middle-aged lady customer admires them and reveals that she once toured as a provocatively clad magician's assistant. Get up and do what makes you happy is her advice.

Some of these Days - A young German interviewing his grandparents who were school children under the Nazis and adults in the GDR. His grandad's passion was jazz. Sanctioned for playing records to his friends at school things got better in the early post-war years and then jazz became unGerman again.  Grandad sees things getting worse today.

Three Centimetres -  Four girls, friends, take a ride on a ferris wheel in Beirut. Their chat and banter is mostly about sex.  One comes out as gay.

Bo & Mei -  A recently bereaved Chinese runs a dry cleaning business. He forbids his son Bo to help his sister do the dishes.  He insists Bo drinks beer with his meal. But Bo likes lipstick and is found in  a négligée left for cleaning by a client who objected to the Chinese music playing in the shop.  When she returns to collect it they turn up the volume.

Homage to Kobane - The camera sweeps around the ruins of Kobane while a voiceover reads a letter written by a girl fighter to her mum while she waited for death.

Good Girls - A St. Trinian's style group of girls is rounded up reluctantly for a photograph, one of them skirtless.  The director, asked what inspired her said it was her nice pink jersey and lo that became part of the school uniform.

After the screening of Meeting Jim half a dozen of those involved in making the film lined up and declared their devotion to him.  Jim Haynes is clearly a man with charm which for someone who says that his main interest in life is and always has been people is not surprising. In Edinburgh he helped galvanise cultural life in the 60s with his bookshop in Charles Street, the founding of the Traverse, the Writers Conference and so on.  When he moved south it was our loss and London's gain.  He then moved on again to make Paris his home and maintained his people centred philosophy with his legendary Sunday dinners.

All of this and more is capably told in the film which seamlessly knits together archive footage (including an interview with a onetime philosophy tutor of mine) and new material. That new material is in fact a couple of years old since the editing process stretched over two years.

For those new to Jim Haynes the film will be a revelation. For those familiar with his story it is a confirmation of the debt owed to him by many, not least those of us here in Edinburgh.

My last film of the day was a well told and gripping story of intergenerational conflict in a Pakistani family living in Norway.  From the opening scene in which the heroine runs through snowy streets to ominous music to meet whatever curfew has been imposed on her you know that bad things will happen.

And so they do.  Surprised in an embrace with a local lad she is carted off to Pakistan and dumped on relatives.  Naturally she rebels but after a while seems to be softening and indeed developing feelings for a young man I took to be a cousin.  Alas disaster strikes when she and cousin fall foul of relationship norms.  Dad come out from Norway and invites her to commit suicide.  She doesn't but auntie refuses to keep her so back to Norway she goes.  She lies to the child protection agency about her treatment by her family to protect them.

Their next move is to organise marriage to a suitable chap in Canada.  Suitable from the family's point of view.  But for Nisha this is the last straw.  Without giving anything away I can say that the film ends hopefully.  

I may have made What Will People Say sound a bit trite but it's not.  You need to do a bit of suspending disbelief.  You'd very probably hide your involvement with friends and activities that your conservative family would disapprove of but very improbably smuggle a boyfriend into your bedroom even if it was just for a cuddle.

That aside the conflict is real as are the dilemmas that young immigrants find themselves in and the film deals with all of it sympathetically and movingly.