Edinburgh Film Festival: Finlay Pretsell on ‘Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon’ and making a conceptual artist’s mind the focus

The Edinburgh Film Festival is screening “Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon,” a feature film directed by Finlay Pretsell that centers on the artist Douglas Gordon and the thought processes behind his work. In discussion tied to the film, Pretsell framed the project as more than a conventional biographical portrait, describing it as an effort to capture “the mind of a conceptual artist,” with Gordon’s own perspective and artistic methods shaping how the story is told.

Pretsell came to the project after directing “Time Trial” in 2017, a sports drama that followed the last year of disgraced Scottish cyclist David Millar’s professional career at the Tour de France. In interviews about his new film, Deadline reported that the director’s earlier work started from an apparently straightforward premise before shifting toward larger questions about narrative, discipline, and how competing motivations can be contained within a structured setting.

Gordon, in Pretsell’s telling, functions as both subject and organizing force. The film, described by Deadline as “Douglas Gordon By Douglas Gordon,” uses the premise of Gordon speaking about himself to guide the audience through the habits of conceptual practice, where meaning is built through decisions rather than just events. The framing suggests that the film’s core interest is not simply what Gordon made, but how he thinks and how ideas are formed, tested, and refined.

The festival context places the film within a broader public spotlight for contemporary art and the filmmaking techniques used to translate artistic process to screen. Deadline’s report indicates that Pretsell sees this translation challenge as central to the film’s purpose, aiming to convey how conceptual art operates from the inside, including how eccentricity can coexist with method.

Pretsell’s approach also carries the practical imprint of a director accustomed to balancing audience accessibility with a more layered structure. In describing “Time Trial” as an underdog sports story that could have been treated in familiar ways, Deadline said Pretsell instead used the sports narrative framework as a starting point, leaving room for deeper themes to emerge. That same sensibility informs his current work, according to the way Deadline describes his portrait-making for Gordon.

Deadline reported that Pretsell’s remarks at the festival positioned Gordon’s mind as the film’s central subject, with the director treating conceptual practice as a kind of internal logic that can be dramatized without turning the result into a conventional profile. The film’s portrait format, presented under Gordon’s own name and authorship, is designed to keep the audience anchored to the artist’s worldview rather than shifting focus to external storytelling tropes.

The Edinburgh Film Festival screening of “Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon” marks another step in Pretsell’s move from genre-based storytelling toward direct engagement with contemporary art figures and their creative frameworks. With this release, the director’s work continues to test the boundary between documented perspective and cinematic portraiture, using Gordon’s conceptual orientation as the organizing principle for what the audience is shown and how it is understood.