Mark Cousins’ film at DIFF is cinematic child’s play

Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film, which screens at the Dubai International Film Festival on Sunday, intersperses footage of his family with clips from films, while he narrates in his distinct, inimitable style. Kaleem Aftab talks to him about his inspirations.

Mark Cousins with his niece and nephew. Lloyd Smith

Even the American comic and actor W C Fields, who coined the adage “Never work with animals or children”, reportedly admired the younger generation. Now, the film documentarian Mark Cousins – the Belfast-born presenter behind the brilliant, 15-part series The Story of Film: An Odyssey – highlights the power of children in cinema with his adorable and informative new film essay A Story of Children and Film.

The genesis of the project came when the 48-year-old was at his Edinburgh apartment looking after his nephew, Ben, and his niece, Laura. Cousins, who likes to film things every day, set up a small, hand-held camera and shot Ben and Laura playing. He was struck by how they reacted to the camera, seeing traits that he had enjoyed over the years when watching some of the great child performances in cinema. The film intersperses footage of his family with clips from films, while he narrates in his distinct, inimitable style, always informative, sometimes academically so, but delivered after it’s been filtered through his own childlike, wanderlust mind.

Cousins is best known for being a film critic, author and, for two years, the artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. He says that his recent focus on documentary is a return to his first love.

“I started making documentaries after I left university, in 1988,” he explains. “My themes were neo-Nazism, the first Gulf War, the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, etc. I used little or no commentary and we shot observational-style. Then I did a period of film-writing and programming and TV presenting and my books, but imagery was always what I was best at, so I wanted to get back to filmmaking. I’ve always thought of myself as a filmmaker first. At school, I was a slow and late reader. A page of words scares me, but an image is heaven.”

His first TV piece was about childhood; so was his first feature-length film, The First Movie (2009). He says of the power of children on screen: “Children are less guarded, less masked, less inhibited than adults. When they want to show off, they show off. They are not afraid of play – they want to play. George Bernard Shaw said: ‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.’ I think this is true.”

Cousins concentrates on films in which children are the protagonists, rather than those where adults give their opinions on young folk. In addition to some well-known English language classics, such as ET: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), An Angel at My Table (1990) and Kes (1969), he casts his net far and wide, with notable inclusions of films from Iran, India and Africa. This global perspective is reflected in what he considers his favourite depictions of childhood on the big screen: “I think the children in Iranian films such as Willow and Wind and Bag of Rice – both directed by Mohammad-Ali Talebi – are among the best I’ve seen.”