Project Detail

Here Be Dragons

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."

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Details

Year: 2013
Type of project: Features
Running time: 79 mins
Format: 16:9 HD
Director: Mark Cousins
Producer: Don Boyd, Genc Permeti
Executive Producer: Genc Permeti
Editor: Timo Langer
Screenwriter: Mark Cousins, Thomas Logoreci
Director of Photography: Mark Cousins
Sound: Ali Murray
Composer: Immigrant Suns, Elizabeth Temple
Principal cast: Mark Cousins

Production Status

Complete

Production Company

Hibrow Productions

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Tracing the evolution of documentary film across time, examining international landmark works and hidden treasures, while revealing how the form has helped us see and make sense of our world. Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2026 - World premiere Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2026 - Berlinale Special Series - European premiere (episode 1) | World premiere (episodes 2-4)

History

Cinema Has Been My True Love

Director: Mark Cousins

Year: 2023

Cinema Has Been My True Love: The Work and Times of Lynda Myles In Mark Cousins’ meditative documentary, Lynda Myles, an influential connoisseur of cinema, reflects on her adventures in the film culture she helped establish. From 1973 to 1980, as the first female director of any festival, Myles transformed the Edinburgh Film Festival into a vibrant, iconoclastic mecca of discovery, championing the work of overlooked auteurs including Hitchcock, Sirk and Sam Fuller. Official selection Telluride Film Festival 2023 - World premiere

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Director: Mark Cousins

Year: 2024

A creative biography of the Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. One of the most important women in British modern art, the painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was a highly inspirational figure, whose work was deeply impacted by a pivotal event in her life. In May 1949, this leading representative of the modernist St. Ives group of artists climbed to the top of the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland, an experience which was to transform the way she saw the world. She spent the rest of her life capturing its shapes and colours, indeed its very essence. In his essayistic portrait Cousins delves into complex themes of gender, climate change and creativity, while laying bare the artist’s character and vast imagination so pervasively that he creates the impression we are seeing the world through her eyes. Official Selection Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2024 - World premiere Official Selection Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024

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