Forget the champagne receptions, red carpets and glitzy awards ceremonies: when Britain's newest film festival opens next month it will be in a disused bingo hall. The audience will eat fairy cakes and sit on bean bags while watching a distinctly unfashionable line-up of movies, including Singin' in the Rain.

Described as “the anti-film festival film festival”, the week-long event in the Highland town of Nairn is the brainchild of Tilda Swinton, the Oscar-winning actress and local resident, who has planned it as a reaction to the “stuffy and business-orientated” crop of current festivals.

While Nairn is, for the moment at least, unlikely to join Cannes, Venice and Berlin on the international film festival circuit, Swinton has high hopes that it will become an annual event. She said that she wanted to

“inject some romance into the film festival circuit” and to escape “the shackles” of film release schedules.

From August 15 to 23, the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams will take as its home a Scots baronial building that was a bingo hall until last year. Attendees will pay £3 - or a tray of home-made cakes in lieu of payment - for entry. When no films are showing, they will be encouraged to explore the local countryside by going for a walk or a bike ride.

Celebrities expected attend include Joel Coen, whose film No Country for Old Men won the Oscar for best picture this year. He was reportedly won over by Swinton's idea for an unpretentious celebration, and has offered to help to draw up the programme.

Mark Cousins, the former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, who is organising the event with Swinton, said that the idea was to re-create “that first moment when you fall in love with cinema”.

“Film festivals are terribly serious, business-orientated, but this is totally playful. It's almost like a circus we're trying to put on, with the emphasis on entertainment and surprise and a certain quixotic quality,” he said.

“From Poland to Senegal we've had the same reaction - thank God someone is doing this. Tilda and I feel strongly that in a place like Nairn

we're doing something this international that isn't trying to make money, isn't trying to help the marketing strategy of a film, isn't trying to be part of the juggernaut of Hollywood.”

Although full details have yet to be publicised, the list of films is expected to be decidely different from most festivals. It will include many older movies, including Powell and Pressburger's 1945 classic I Know Where I Am Going and Henry Hathaway's 1935 romance Peter Ibbetson, said to be one of Swinton's favourite films.

The programme will also include Sylvain Chomet's The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1998) and Mohammad-Ali Talebi's children's film, The Boot (1992). The festival will include a “singing day”, on August 18, which will feature a screening of Singin' in the Rain (1952) - an appropriate choice for the Scottish Highlands.

There will also be a Senegalese revenge drama and Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). The festival will close with Frederico Fellini's classic Eight-and-a-half, the 1963 black-and-white film widely acknowledged as one of the greatest ever made.

The £15,000 cost of the project is being met almost entirely by Swinton, 47, who this year won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her portrayal of a scheming lawyer in Michael Clayton. She has a home in Nairn with her partner, John Byrne, the Scottish artist and writer.

Cousins said that the festival would show some new films “but what we are not trying to do at all is compete or stamp on the toes of those festivals that are trying to be premiere festivals. There will be no champagne receptions, absolutely not, no opening addresses and no politicians - it will be purely triple-distilled cinephilia.”

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