Two knights of the cinema, Sean Connery and Ben Kingsley, and Tilda Swinton, one of this year's Oscar winners, are among the big names of the British screen set to appear at the Edinburgh International Film Festival next month - the first June staging of its 62-year history.

The homegrown flavour of the event is emphasised in its closing gala, Faintheart, starring Ewen Bremner, and its opening world premiere, The Edge of Love, which features Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller and is scripted by Knightley's mother, Sharman MacDonald.

The considerable presence of Shane Meadows, and the world premiere of his drama, Somers Town, further underlines the strength of British talent on display.

The bill was unveiled only days after the Cannes festival revealed a line-up studded with US stars such as Robert De Niro, Julianne Moore and Sean Penn - but with little British talent. Edinburgh should help to redress the balance, Hannah McGill, the festival's artistic director, said.

“We have always explicitly supported British film, and though it is not a rule that we open and close with British films, it is good when we can engage with the local industry and for the film economy.

“That is especially true, when one of the stories out of Cannes was that it wasn't programming much British stuff. It is one of the functions of our festival to take the temperature of what is going on here,” Ms McGill said.

Despite this emphasis, the bill sets out to live up to its promise to reinvent itself in “the independent spirit” of Sundance, the successful American film festival. Edinburgh gives an international premiere to The Wackness, one of the commercial hits of Sundance 2008, and features a stream of independent movies from across the globe.

These include Eat, for This is My Body, billed as “an extraordinary visual poem on the turbulent history of Haiti”, and the Jordanian film Captain Abu Raed, which won the world cinema award at Sundance. The films of Jeanne Moreau, the French star of Jules et Jim and Les Liaisons Dangereuses are featured in retrospective.

Ms McGill took particular delight in a strong emphasis on animation, which she hoped would help to establish a tradition at the festival. After Ratatouille in 2007, for a successive year, the Edinburgh bill scores a coup by securing the European premiere of a much-anticipated Pixar feature, Wall:E. It also features Bill Plympton's film Idiots and Angels and an in-conversation event with Ray Harryhausen, the veteran stop-motion animator who helped to create the 1960s classic Jason and the Argonauts.

Despite this considerable international presence, it is likely that the household names from Britain will prove most popular with the festival audience. Robert Carlyle stars in the much-anticipated Stone of Destiny, and in Kenny Glenaan's Summer, and critics are predicting a positive response to Martin Radich's bleakly funny debut feature, Crack Willow.

Sir Sean and Swinton will attend the festival in the role as patrons of the event.

Meadows's star in particular is in the ascendant, after his triumph with This is England. Its successor, Somers Town, again showcases the talents of the young actor, Thomas Turgoose, this time as a runaway in London who befriends a Polish boy, played by Piotr Jagiello. Much of the action is set around St Pancras station, and Eurostar helped to fund the film.

“Somers Town is filmed in black and white and focuses on young people. He has an amazing ear for how people talk to each other and a wonderful method of addressing issues without being aggressive. Thomas is wonderful, so spontaneous and unselfconscious,” Ms McGill said.

Sir Ben is another British performer enjoying the limelight and festival sources said they were hopeful the actor would attend. A star of The Wackness and Transsiberian, in a third Edinburgh film, Elegy, he plays an ageing professor who falls in love with a student, in an adaptation of Philip Roth's novel, The Dying Animal.

Two of the festival's most anticipated films are documentaries. Standard Operating Procedure, is a harrowing portrayal of events in Abu Ghraib prison, directed by Errol Morris.

“It is a very disturbing film, but very interesting,” Ms McGill said.

And she named Man on Wire, the story of Philippe Petit's illegal tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York as a favourite and a moving reminder of the towers and their inhabitants.