Festival on AllMovie

Take a trip backstage at the renowned Edinburgh Festival to explore the curious egos of three emerging talents in the feature debut from director Annie Griffin. A stage-trained theater purist eager to share her talent and enthusiasm with the outside world, Faith (Lyndsey Marshall) has been honing her one-woman show about Dorothy Wordsworth to perfection. Laid-back Irish comic Tommy O'Dwyer (Chris O'Dowd) is not so purely driven. A veteran of the club circuit desperate to break big, Tommy takes to seduction as a means of securing a vote. Though the presence of established television comic Sean Sullivan (Stephen Mangan) at the festival indeed shakes the confidence of his less famous competitors, the resentment he shows to those who haven't yet become a household name leads to a bitter cycle of resentment that could quickly sink his reputation among his peers. It's not all about the laughs at Edinburgh though, and as Faith, Tommy, and Sean play cut-throat on the comedy scene an experimental Canadian theater troupe prepares an elaborate act that's sure to stun the crowd.