Projects matching: Mark Cousins

Synopsis

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

Synopsis

Structuring this intimate and insightful portrait of Lynda Myles, academic Susan Kemp invokes a form known to define, criticise, and shift paradigms in culture – the manifesto. Meshing archival material with interview subjects including Jim Hickey and B. Ruby Rich, Kemp employs a series of provocations to tease out the philosophy behind a lifetime of ground-breaking film work. In the film's central conversation, Myles beautifully expresses the thrill of putting on a show (including the 1972 Women's Event, pioneering retrospectives of Douglas Sirk, Sam Fuller and Raoul Walsh and many more) while always avoiding the polite.
This vivid filmic manifesto is an active document set to inspire anyone who programmes, produces or simply loves cinema today. (Kate Taylor)
Official selection Dublin International Film Festival 2024 - UK premiere

Synopsis

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

Synopsis

A film about the handful of streets around the Cowgate, Edinburgh, which have long housed a proud Irish diaspora. A film about folk music and its power to connect people.
Musician Aidan O’Rourke, from the celebrated folk trio Lau, lives in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town. During lockdown, Aidan got to know three of his octogenarian neighbours, all called Margaret, and listened to their stories. Aidan brings together a group of sensational Irish and Scottish folk musicians and explores through music and storytelling what home and belonging mean.
Featuring a stunning original soundtrack by O’Rourke and live performances by Liam Ó Maonlai, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Comac Begley, Róisín Chambers and Aoife Ní Bhriain.

Aidan O’Rourke is a fiddler and composer. Raised in Argyll, his roots are Scottish and Irish but his music roams the edges of those traditions.
Becky Manson is a filmmaker from Orkney. Interested in routine, repetition, and ritual, she tells small stories that speak to universal themes.
Mark Cousins has directed twenty feature films. His themes are cinema, cities, recovery, walking and looking. Among many he has won the Prix Italia, the Stanley Kubrick award, the EFA's Innovation award, a Peabody.

Synopsis

A yearly drive with the famous UK producer Jeremy Thomas from London to Cannes, on his way to the Cannes Film Festival. A life in the service of cinema, a journey towards the discovery of new films and talents in the company of the cinephile director and author Mark Cousins. Cousins gives an intimate glimpse into the life of the legendary icon behind some of the most controversial and acclaimed films of all time including Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE LAST EMPEROR, David Cronenberg’s CRASH, and Nic Roeg’s BAD TIMING.
Official Selection Cannes Film Festival 2021 - Cannes Classics - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Create

Synopsis

A decade after THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY, an expansive and influential inquiry into the state of moviemaking in the 20th century, filmmaker Mark Cousins returns with an epic and hopeful tale of cinematic innovation from around the globe. In this film Cousins turns his sharp, meticulously honed gaze on world cinema from 2010 to 2021, using a surprising range of works - including JOKER, FROZEN and CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR - as launchpads to explore recurring themes and emerging motifs, from the evolution of film language, to technology’s role in moviemaking today, to shifting identities in 21st-century world cinema. Touching on everything from PARASITE and THE FAREWELL to BLACK PANTHER and LOVER'S ROCK, Cousins seeks out films, filmmakers and communities under-represented in traditional film histories, with a particular emphasis on Asian and Middle Eastern works, as well as boundary-pushing documentaries and films that see gender in new ways. And as the recent pandemic recedes, Cousins ponders what comes next in the streaming age: how have we changed as cinephiles, and how will moviegoing continue to transform in the digital century, to our collective joy and wonder.
Official Selection Cannes Film Festival 2021 - Cannes Classics - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Create

Synopsis

Facing the threat of losing his sight, award-winning filmmaker Mark Cousins embarks on an intimate odyssey from his bed to explore the central role of looking in his own life, and in the past, present and future of human experience.
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2021 - Closing Film - World premiere

Synopsis

As told through clips from 183 female directors, this epic revisionist history of the cinema focuses on women’s integral role in the development of film art.
Using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and five continents, Mark Cousins asks how films are made, shot and edited; how stories are shaped and how movies depict life, love, politics, humour and death, all through the compelling lens of some of the world’s greatest filmmakers – all of them women.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2018 - TIFF Docs - World premiere

Synopsis

Mark Cousins' upcoming film project will be 16 hours when completed (in Spring 2019). The first four hours episodes are narrated by Tilda Swinton.
The complete film will be made up of forty “chapters” to be narrated by Tilda Swinton and other key women in cinema. Following in the footsteps of Mark Cousins’ 'The Story of Film: An Odyssey', giving a guided tour of the art and craft of the movies. Using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and five continents, Cousins asks how films are made, shot and edited; how stories are shaped and how movies depict life, love, politics, humour and death, all through the compelling lens of some of the world’s greatest directors – all of them women.
“Many films about cinema feature mostly male directors – 'Women Directing Film' challenges that. It tries to change the canon. It’s not about the lives of these great directors, it’s about their work. It is a film school, where all the teachers are female. The intention of this film is to, as Diaghilev and Cocteau said, “astonish us.” To campaign for equality in cinema is compellingly right and part of that campaign must be to celebrate the great women directors from around the world and from every decade, to insert them into the canon where they rightly belong and from which they have been excluded by many film historians, mostly male.” (Mark Cousins)
“Cinema: the great empathy machine. The ultimate invitation to walk in other people’s shoes, to look through their eyes, follow their thoughts, make their connections. This is the radical project of cinema itself. It transforms - it liberates us as we watch. It makes us fit for evolution.” (Tilda Swinton)
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2018 - TIFF Docs

Synopsis

Orson Welles trained as an artist before he become an actor and director, and continued to draw and paint throughout his career - character sketches, storyboards, set designs, pictures of the people and places that inspired him. These artworks are a sketchbook of his life, and most have never been seen outside his family and close friends.
For the first time, award-winning director Mark Cousins has been granted access to this treasure trove of imagery, to make a film about what he finds there - the story of Welles' visual thinking, never before told. An exclusive new perspective on one of the 20th century's greatest creative figures, whose art and life continue to fascinate audiences today.
Official Selection Cannes Film Festival 2018 - Cannes Classics - World premiere

Synopsis

Awaiting synopsis
Official Selection Rotterdam International Film Festival 2018

Synopsis

Acclaimed documentarian Mark Cousins moves into fiction with this intriguing musical film, perhaps best described as a city symphony.
'Stockholm My Love' follows the footsteps of Alva Achebe (Neneh Cherry), a Swedish architect fascinated by the way buildings influence lives, but haunted by a tragic event in her past. One year ago, Alva was involved in a car accident, and ever since, her trauma has held her hostage in her daily life. On the anniversary of this shocking event, she’s at breaking point and can’t face the day ahead, so tries to get lost in the historic city of Stockholm. But her wanderings only draw her back towards her past, and the site of her tragedy. There she starts to take her first hesitant steps towards recovery.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Journey Strand - World premiere