In 1978, director Michael Powell and some of the surviving cast and crew went back to Foula to re-visit the island where they had made The Edge of the World, the film that changed their lives. This was made for BBC TV to act as "colour bookends" to the 1937 film and is called Return to the Edge of the World. In the first part, Powell drives in to Pinewood Studios and tells how the film came to be made. Then he, John Laurie, Sydney Streeter, Grant Sutherland and others return to Foula. In the second part, they talk to some of the islanders who were there in 1936 and remember those who couldn't make the reunion.
Despite a bit of overacting by John Laurie, some inaccuracies (e.g. actor Finlay Currie died at the age of 90 and not 93; cinematographer Skeets Kelly was killed during the shooting of Zeppelin, not The Blue Max), and a brief celebration of oil drilling that, uhm... didn't age very well, this documentary is a little gem that shows Foula's magnificent landscape.While watching it, I couldn't help thinking about how another director, Michelangelo Antonioni, was fascinated by the island where he filmed L'avventura (1960) to the point that he went back to the Aeolian archipelago many years later and shot the documentary Ritorno a Lisca Bianca (Return to Lisca Bianca, 1983), whose title is almost identical to that of Powell's film.
