There is something fitting about Borges and Me beginning its life with an audience in Scotland. Earlier this month, Marc Turtletaub’s film had its world premiere at the 2026 Edinburgh International Film Festival, bringing a story built around a journey through the country back to the landscapes that shape so much of it. Adapted from Jay Parini’s memoir, the film follows a young Parini, played by Fionn Whitehead, as an unexpected trip with Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, played by Luis Gnecco, takes the pair from St Andrews through the Highlands and islands of Scotland.
CultureCues caught the film at its world premiere, where it became one of our favourites of this year’s festival. At the centre of the story is Jay, initially reserved and difficult to read, whose journey with Borges gradually draws him towards people, experiences and parts of himself he has been keeping at a distance. Among those people is Ailith, played by Freya Mavor, whose brief but important connection with Jay becomes another part of a film interested in the people who can enter our lives for only a short time and leave something behind.
While at EIFF, CultureCues sat down with Fionn Whitehead and Freya Mavor to talk about bringing Borges and Me to Edinburgh, the fleeting connections at the heart of the film, and their experiences bringing Jay and Ailith to life on screen throughout the journey.
Scotland as the ‘beating heart’ of Borges and Me
Scotland is never simply scenery in Borges and Me. The journey from St Andrews through the Highlands is central to the story, and closely tied to Jay gradually opening himself up to the people and experiences around him, making Edinburgh feel like a particularly fitting place for the film’s first public screening.
For Whitehead, there could hardly have been a better setting for the premiere.
“It feels great. I mean, it’s perfect,” he told CultureCues. “Perfect timing for the film, perfect place to premiere. Scotland is such a big part of the film, so it’s so perfect to screen it here.”
Mavor agreed, describing Scotland as something even more fundamental to the story.
“Yeah, it feels really right. It’s like the beating heart of the film,” she said. “And then also I feel like Scotland is such a buzzy place and people are so, I don’t know, like with the Fringe, people are so kind of invested in the culture of this country. So I think it feels very fitting.”
It certainly feels that way watching it. The landscape gives the road trip its physical shape, but it also accompanies the changes happening within Jay. The further he travels, the more people he encounters and the more difficult it becomes for him to remain entirely closed off from everything around him.
Fionn Whitehead on finding Jay Parini
One of the strongest aspects of Whitehead’s performance is how much he initially holds back. At the beginning of the film, Jay is awkward, isolated and often subdued. We know that something is sitting underneath that reserve, but the film does not immediately explain what it is. Borges, with his curiosity, humour and near-constant conversation, gradually begins pulling him into the world around him.
There was another complication for Whitehead: the real Jay Parini was around during filming. Asked whether portraying someone with that person there to watch was intimidating, Whitehead admitted that it was.
“Yeah, it was quite intimidating,” he said. “I think I sort of gave myself an out by making a decision. It was like, I’m putting my own spin on Jay Parini, so I wasn’t just doing an impression of him all the way.”
Parini’s presence ultimately became an asset rather than simply an additional pressure.
“It was great to have him there, because he had so much insight into what really happened, and how this felt, how that felt,” Whitehead continued. “And he’s a very lovely kind of positive guy. So it’s always nice to have positive people on a film set, you know, to bring the energy up.”
That restraint in Whitehead’s performance becomes particularly important as the film moves towards revealing the grief Jay has been carrying. When CultureCues asked whether there had been a conscious decision to keep Jay closed off early in the film so that his eventual emotional release could feel earned, Whitehead said that progression was central to how he approached the role.
“I think that was a big part of the story, is Jay. It’s a kind of coming-of-age thing, is him coming into himself and learning to face this big grief that he’s going through,” he explained.
That meant deliberately holding Jay back in the film’s earlier scenes. “At the beginning of the film he’s pretty subdued, quite awkward, and you don’t really know why,” Whitehead said. “Sometimes I was a bit like, ‘Is this a bit of a boring choice for me?’ but I felt like I needed to take it on a sort of journey to earn the kind of big outpouring towards the end and that kind of character arc. So, yeah, it was challenging, but I really enjoyed it.”
That choice pays off. When Jay’s grief finally surfaces, everything Whitehead has withheld earlier in the film suddenly has context. The scene works because the emotion has not appeared from nowhere; it has been sitting quietly underneath the entire journey.
Freya Mavor on Ailith, chemistry and the people who briefly enter our lives
Ailith enters Jay’s story differently. She brings an energy and openness that challenges his instinct to remain on the sidelines, encouraging him to take chances, join in and experience rather than simply observe. Mavor’s performance gives that section of the film a lightness that allows us to see a different version of Jay too.
For Mavor, part of what interested her about Ailith was the way the character exists both independently and through Jay’s memory of her. “She’s a character in her own right, but she’s being kind of experienced and witnessed through his lens,” Mavor explained. “And I guess part of his quest of what he wants and who he is and becoming, I don’t know, a writer, or finding more about his own desires around relationships and stuff.”
Ailith gives the film an opportunity to move briefly away from the larger philosophical conversations surrounding Jay and Borges and towards something immediate.
“A lot of the story is about, you know, thoughts and ideas and creativity and writing and language and philosophy of life,” Mavor said. “And actually, the part with her is quite sort of simple and more embodied and less about sort of grand ideas.”
Instead, what matters is the connection between the two of them and the fact that it is never meant to last forever. “It’s this connection between the two of them and a chemistry, and the fact that it’s quite ephemeral is also really beautiful,” Mavor said. “It has its moment and then it passes. That’s true to life. You meet people and, yeah, they come in and out of your life.”
It is one of the ideas that stayed with us after seeing the film. Jay and Ailith do not need years together for the relationship to matter. Their time is brief, but she changes something in him. By the time their paths separate, he has experienced a version of himself that seemed inaccessible when the journey began.
The same is true, in a different and ultimately deeper way, of Borges.
‘We spent a lot of the time just laughing’
The central friendship between Jay and Borges develops over what is really only a small piece of both men’s lives. They begin the journey as near-strangers and, through hours in the car, unexpected encounters and personal conversations, create a relationship that will remain with Jay long after the trip itself ends.
For Whitehead, working opposite Gnecco was considerably more fun than the emotional weight of the story might suggest. “It was brilliant,” he said. “I had a really good time in that old Morris Traveller.”
Even the car became a source of amusement. Whitehead admitted he had repeatedly been calling it a Morris Minor before being corrected that it was actually a Morris Traveller, prompting a laugh from all three of us as we joked about the car experts who had been quick to set him straight.
More importantly, he found an easy rapport with Gnecco. “Luis is also hilarious, so we spent a lot of the time just laughing,” Whitehead said, before reflecting on the wider cast of people Jay and Borges encounter along the way. “There are so many different characters that come in for shorter periods or longer periods and have a massive influence on both their characters. They’re quite symbolic in a way.”
That tendency to laugh apparently extended well beyond Whitehead and Gnecco. CultureCues brought up Ailith’s very cheeky parting line to Jay, without repeating exactly what she says, and Mavor immediately admitted it had been difficult to deliver with a straight face.
“That was a difficult one to try and do with a straight face,” she said. “I’m also awful. I get very giggly.”
“I’m very bad at not laughing, so I completely encourage it,” Whitehead admitted.
“You were of no help,” Mavor replied.
Whitehead said that once somebody started laughing, he usually made it worse. “Once someone starts to go, I’m just doing everything I can to keep them going,” he said. “It’s that thing where you know you need to stop laughing, but you’re like, ‘I just cannot stop laughing at this point.’ It’s just too funny.”
It is a wonderfully appropriate glimpse behind a film that, despite the grief sitting beneath Jay’s journey, finds so much joy in the strange circumstances that bring people together.
Speaking with Whitehead and Mavor after the premiere reinforced something that Borges and Me communicates beautifully: the length of a relationship has little to do with the significance it can hold. Ailith arrives in Jay’s life and leaves again. Borges shares only a brief journey through Scotland with him. Other characters appear for even shorter stretches, each encounter nudging Jay somewhere new.
Those connections do not need to last forever to matter. As Mavor put it, people “come in and out of your life”, and Borges and Me is particularly interested in what remains when they do. For a story about memory, writing and all the ways we eventually make sense of our own lives, there could hardly have been a more appropriate place for its journey with audiences to begin than back in what Mavor calls the film’s Scottish “beating heart”.
For CultureCues, Borges and Me was one of the highlights of EIFF 2026, earning a five-star review, which you can read in full here. Speaking with Whitehead and Mavor afterwards was just as much fun as we hoped, with plenty of laughs shared along the way. We also had the chance to sit down with Luis Gnecco, who plays Borges, and director Marc Turtletaub, and you can read that interview here.
Nikki Murray is a UK-based writer, screenwriter and founder & editor of CultureCues, covering film, television, music and pop culture. Her work focuses on storytelling and the moments shaping modern entertainment.