3 Movies Directed by Mark Cousins

The First Movie

The First Movie

Basic Info:

Released Date:

2010-09-04

Countries:

UK, Canada

Runtime:

76 min

IMDB Ratings:

7.3 (168 Reviews)

Director:

Mark Cousins

Genres:

Documentary

Fullplot:

An innovative 'magic realist' documentary set in Iraq. Filmmaker Mark Cousins, who was brought up in a Northern Irish war zone, travels to Goptapa, a Kurdish-Iraqi village of just 700 people on a tributary of the Tigris river, and tries to make a dream film about a place that is normally only portrayed in current affairs programmes. He gives the kids cameras. They make little movies about war, love, a fish that goes to a magical place, and a chicken who debates justice. Despite the production being stopped twice by the Iraqi secret police, The First Movie is about wonder and the power of the imagination.

Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons

Basic Info:

Released Date:

2013-08-30

Languages:

English

Countries:

UK

Runtime:

79 min

IMDB Ratings:

7.7 (24 Reviews)

Director:

Mark Cousins

Genres:

Documentary

Cast:

Writer:

Mark Cousins

Thomas Logoreci

Fullplot:

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."

Life May Be

Life May Be

Basic Info:

Released Date:

2014-06-21

Languages:

English, Persian

Countries:

UK, Iran

Runtime:

80 min

IMDB Ratings:

6.2 (43 Reviews)

Cast:

Writer:

Mania Akbari

Mark Cousins

Fullplot:

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.

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