Another starry location is to be added to the list of the world's most famous film festivals, following the lead of Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Edinburgh: the Highland town of Nairn.

A major new festival will be launched this summer in the "Brighton of the North", set up by local resident and multi-award winning actresses Tilda Swinton and backed by Mark Cousins, a former director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Oscar-winning writer/director Joel Coen.

The Edinburgh festival has this year been staged in June for the first time, so the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams event in Nairn may prove a new August destination for film buffs in Scotland and further afield.

The festival is due to take place between August 15-23, based at the old Ballerina Ballroom on the town's high street.

A bingo hall until it closed last year, the ballroom was, in its heyday, a centre of arts and entertainment - John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best played there as the Silver Beatles in May 1960, on a tour of Scotland backing Johnny Gentle, as well as other bands such as Cream, Pink Floyd and The Who.

The festival will show some new films, but its programme looks set to be dominated by personal favourites of the organisers as well as classics of cinema history.

Full details of the programme have yet to be revealed but the list of movies already mentioned include many older films than are usually shown at festivals, including Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where I Am Going and Henry Hathaway's romance Peter Ibbetson, from 1935, which has been described as one of Swinton's favourite movies.

Others include Sylvain Chomet's The Old Lady And The Pigeons and Mohammed Ali Talebi's children's film, The Boots. The closing film is Federico Fellini's classic movie 8 1/2, the 1963 black-and-white movie which is a regular on lists of the greatest films ever made.

The festival has been called the "brainchild" of Oscar-winning Swinton - who has a home in Nairn with her partner John Byrne, the Scottish artist and writer - and Cousins.

Cousins said that one of the aims of the festival was to add some romance to the industry dominated film festival circuit, as well as showing films which are outside the rigid confines of cinema release schedules.

"This festival grows out of a passion that Tilda Swinton and I have for trying to get as imaginative films as possible to young people," Cousins said.

He added that the festival will be unlike any other major film festival: no red carpets, awards or huge parties. "There will be no champagne receptions, absolutely not, no opening addresses and no politicians - it will be purely triple-distilled cinephilia."

He said that the festival will 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".

The long-term aim of the event is "to reinject some romance into the film festival circuit" and to escape "the shackles" of release schedules.

The guests invited to the festivals are expected to include a mix of festival directors, film producers from the UK, curators, journalists and local children.

Swinton and Cousins are also collaborating on another project, setting up an "8 1/2 Foundation" aimed at building enthusiasm among young cinema-goers.

Cousins is a partner in a film-making company, 4Way Pictures, with director Antonia Bird, the actor Robert Carlyle and the writer Irvine Welsh. He has produced Welsh's first original screenplay Meat Trade as well as Welsh's adaptation of Alan Warner's novel The Man Who Walks.