Projects matching: Mark Cousins

Synopsis

A biographical documentary about the remarkable and turbulent career of British film and TV director Antonia Bird - the first British woman to direct a Hollywood movie, who died in 2013.
The film explores her battles to break down the barriers against her gender and her politics, to get her voice heard, and to bring a radical edge to popular drama.
It reveals the secrets of her greatest work - Safe, Priest, Face, Ravenous, Care, The Hamburg Cell - through the testimony of her closest friends and collaborators, including Robert Carlyle, Mark Cousins, Kate Hardie, Irvine Welsh and Steven Mackintosh.

Synopsis

"Belfast, it’s a city that is changing, changing because the people are leaving? But one came back, a 10,000 year old woman who claims that she is the city itself." Mark Cousins.
A unique film about an infamous place, with this 10,000 year old woman as our free spirited walking tour guide. Starting in the here and now, with the everyday, we move on to the dream life of the city, mapping the voices of women and the liminal spaces, the unnoticed and the unloved things about this place. But she also looks back and she sees the tragedy and the horror of what went before. She remembers everything… 'I Am Belfast' highlights Mark Cousins’ influences, inherently cinematic, but all the while underscored by the influence of the grandparents, the mothers, the brothers and the women of the city he comes from.
Belfast Film Festival 2015 - World premiere

Synopsis

Documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins follows in the footsteps of DH Lawrence in a road-trip through Sardinia.
London Film Festival 2014 - World premiere

Synopsis

An epistolary feature film: a cinematic discourse between a British director Mark Cousins (the celebrated film maker and historian) and an Iranian actress and director Mania Akbari (famed for her work with Abbas Kiarostami and in her own right as a director) which extends the concept of "essay film" with startling confrontations in the arenas of cultural issues, gender politics and differing artistic sensibilities.
A unique journey into the minds of two exceptional filmmakers which becomes a love affair on film.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2014 - World premiere

Synopsis

Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country's film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins' film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins' road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: "If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet's land."

Synopsis

A poetic documentary about the nature of happiness. Filmed in Mexico over three days, for just £10, it begins as a film about the soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, and then, using his ideas, opens up to look at memory, landscape and the pleasures of walking.

Synopsis

A Story of Children and Film is the world's first movie about kids in global cinema. It's passionate, poetic, portrait of the adventure of childhood: its surrealism, loneliness, fun, destructiveness and stroppiness: as seen through 53 great films from 25 countries. A story of children and film is an eye opener, a landmark film and a celebration of both childhood and the movies.

Synopsis

Filmmaker and historian Mark Cousins adapts his book of the same title into a 15-hour exploration of cinema's artistry with a global perspective from the silent era to the digital age.

Synopsis

We see Iraqi kids regularly in our media. Nearly always as part of the war, its victims, its adjuncts. But what about their imaginative lives? Inspired a bit by Night of the Hunter, Northern Irish Mark Cousins went to a small village in the Kurdish North, took a projector, some great movies and 3 small cameras to give to kids. The resulting film is about war, yes, but also about not-war: We hear of a fish called Bery who lives in a magical palace, and about a cow that farts. A child combs a dove's feathers in the gloaming. We meet a boy who 'gives his dreams to the mud'.