News

Cph:forum, the financing and co-production arm of documentary festival Cph:dox, has unveiled its lineup of projects, including those by director Tamara Kotevska, Oscar nominated for “Honeyland,” and producers Monica Hellström, Oscar nominated for “Flee,” and Sigrid Dyekjær, Oscar nominated for “The Cave” and an Emmy winner with “The Territory.”

Other projects include those by directors such as Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan (“Nocturnes”), Jennie Livingston (“Paris Is Burning”), Peter Middleton (“Notes on Blindness”), Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson, Margreth Olin (“Songs of Earth”), Anabel Rodriguez (“Once Upon a Time in Venezuela”), Mark Cousins (“The Story of Film: An Odyssey”), Robin Petré (“Only on Earth”), and Agnieszka Zwiefka (“Silent Trees”), along with producers such as James Paul Dallas (“Invisible Beauty”) and John Archer (“Bogancloch”).

The event, which runs March 24-27 in Copenhagen, Denmark, will bring together 75 directors and producers representing 26 countries who will take the stage to present 30 new documentary...

A century removed from his directorial debut, Alfred Hitchcock remains one of the most influential filmmakers in cinema — but how does his work and legacy hold up in today’s society?

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock aims to tackle that question in the director’s own voice. The documentary will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on January 14 via Cohen Media Group.

Directed by award-winning documentarian Mark Cousins, the film is framed by Hitchcock (voiced by British impressionist Alistair McGowan) revisiting his filmography.

From his early silent efforts to iconic works like Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, and beyond, viewers are taken on an odyssey through Hitchcock’s storied career.

Special Features include:

Cinema Q&a with Chuck Rose: Interview with Director Mark Cousins Alternate trailer with narration by Mark Cousins Alastair McGowan voice test audio Graphics animation tests Mark Cousins introduces Notorious, Rope, and Saboteur

My Name Is Alfred...

Joining the ranks of films about great artists who have been forgotten and deserve to be rediscovered is A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, the latest documentary film made by the cinepahile doc filmmaker Mark Cousins. This new film is a unique and captivating look at the life of a Scottish artist named Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who preferred to be called Willie for most of her life. It premiered at the 2024 Karlovy Vary Film Festival where it won the top prize - the Crystal Globe Grand Prix as chosen by the fest's jury. In all honesty, it would not have been my personal pick from the competition (I prefer Loveable over this one) but this win will give it a chance to gain extra attention and, above all else, allow more people to learn about Willie. As is usual with Mark Cousins' films, he narrates the story and integrates himself into...

Everybody loves painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, including Tilda Swinton.

“I messaged her a while ago, saying I was making this film. She said: ‘I’m on fire for Willie,’” Mark Cousins, director of biographical documentary “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things,” tells Variety.

“Willie didn’t live a dramatic life, she wasn’t going to fancy parties. Then there was the sexism of the art world and agism. She changed her style, too, and the art world doesn’t like that. The film world doesn’t like that either. It wants a Hitchcock film to be like a Hitchcock film.”

“Abbas Kiarostami told me once he wanted his films to be pure on the outside and rich on the inside. Willie’s life seemed undramatic but inside, there was a raging fire.”

In his Karlovy Vary Film Festival winner “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things,” Cousins peeks inside the mind of the forgotten artist,...

Cari Beauchamp, the widely respected historian and author of several books on Hollywood who often appeared on Turner Classics Movies programming and at the network’s annual TCM Classic Film Festival, has died. She was 74.

TCM posted a tribute to Beauchamp on its Twitter/X page Friday.

“We are saddened to hear of the loss of one of our TCM family, trailblazing historian Cari Beauchamp,” the network wrote today. Without her invaluable work, many female creatives would be lost to history. We are grateful for her many contributions to our network over the years.”

Beauchamp’s work focused on the role of women in Hollywood, including in her books Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and The Powerful Women of Early Hollywood and Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s. She also wrote Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years, edited Anita Loos...

Cari Beauchamp, a widely respected Hollywood historian and author who was a frequent presence on Turner Classic Movies and a contributor to Variety, has died. She was 74.

Beauchamp was a prolific writer who often focused on the stories of female pioneers in the entertainment industry. Among the books she wrote or co-wrote over the years were “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and The Powerful Women of Early Hollywood” and “Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival.” She also edited and annotated “Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by the Creator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Other books included “Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s” and “Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years.”

Born in Berkeley, Calif., Beauchamp worked as a private investigator, a campaign manager and as press secretary to California Gov. Jerry Brown before she...

Cari Beauchamp, the respected film historian who put readers and viewers in close touch with the early days of Hollywood through her painstaking research as an author, editor and documentary filmmaker, died Thursday. She was 74.

Beauchamp died of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, her son Jake Flynn told The Hollywood Reporter.

She was unable to attend an Oct. 28 event at the Tcl Chinese Theatre that celebrated authors represented on THR’s recent unveiling of “The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time.”

Beauchamp is on the exclusive list thanks to Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. First published in 1997, it centers on Marion, who became the highest-paid screenwriter, man or woman, in Hollywood by 1917 before receiving Oscars for The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1931).

Beauchamp then wrote and produced for TCM a 2001 documentary based on the book, earning a WGA nomination along the way.

Judy Balaban, the daughter of a longtime studio mogul who dated Montgomery Clift and Merv Griffin, married Tony Franciosa and served as one of Grace Kelly’s bridesmaids at her wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco, has died. She was 91.

Balaban died Thursday night in a hospital in Los Angeles, her friend, author and documentary filmmaker Cari Beauchamp, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Balaban was a champion for civil rights, serving on the board of directors for the ACLU of Southern California for decades.

In a 2010 piece for Vanity Fair that she and Beauchamp co-wrote, Balaban described using LSD (then legal) as a form of therapy in the early 1960s when her good friends Cary Grant and his third wife, Betsy Drake, were using it, too.

“What I had with Cary and Betsy was a kind of soul-baringness that the culture didn’t start to deal with until years later,” she says in the story.

From the Nc-17 ménage à trois of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” to James Spader having intercourse with Rosanna Arquette’s leg wound in David Cronenberg’s “Crash,” producer Jeremy Thomas loves a controversy onscreen.

Cinema raconteur Mark Cousins pays homage to the Oscar-winning producer in his 2021 Cannes Classics selection, “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas.” The film follows Cousins on Thomas’ annual pilgrimage to the Cannes Film Festival — literally, the producer drove for decades from England to the fest — and a five-day road movie through France. Together, they remember Thomas’ most acclaimed and provocative films as a producer, from his Oscar-winning “The Last Emperor” to “Crash” and its scandalous opening at the festival in 1996, Nicolas Roeg’s “Bad Timing,” Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Eo,” plus Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch,” Jonathan Glazer’s “Sexy Beast,” and Terry Gilliam’s reviled child abuse fairy tale, “Tideland.”

The film includes Thomas’ stories of movie stars like Marlon Brando,...

To step inside Sarajevo’s Apollo Cinema 30 years ago, you first had to find the door.

The streets of the Bosnian capital were pitch black. Power cuts brought on by a crippling siege, which started in 1992 when Bosnian Serb forces surrounded the city, left the town plunged in darkness. Residents fortunate enough to own gasoline-powered generators were reluctant to use them, for fear that lights would attract sniper fire. Shelling left giant holes in the streets and pavement. The locals referred to them as “rosebuds.”

The Apollo was housed in the basement of the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts, where the Obala Art Center — a group that had risen to prominence in the 1980s — mounted acclaimed stage productions that traveled around the world. Visitors entered through a hole in the wall ringing the perimeter of the academy, crossed a small courtyard to the building’s back door and descended a steep flight of stairs.

When the Sarajevo Film Festival returned to full strength last year after successive, slimmed-down pandemic editions, a robust turn-out was to be expected. For nearly three decades, the audience-facing event has been the cultural lifeblood of the lively, cosmopolitan city it calls home.

The 2022 edition broke attendance records set in 2019, and just days after its online ticketing system launched this month, the fest appears on pace to surpass that mark again. It is a testament to the enduring love affair between a city and a festival that was founded in impossible circumstances in 1995, at the tail end of a brutal, four-year siege — proof that even in times of war and scarcity, cinema could endure.

The festival returns Aug. 11 – 18, with organizers insisting the event’s 29th edition will stay true to its roots. “We wanted to keep the festival focused on its main goals: presenting the best of cinema today to...

The Berlin Film Festival has revealed its juries, and the addition of Liu Jian’s animated feature “Art College 1994” to its competition lineup, which now has 19 films and is complete.

In addition to the already announced actor Kristen Stewart as president, the International Jury members will be actor Golshifteh Farahani (Iran/France), director and writer Valeska Grisebach (Germany), director and screenwriter Radu Jude (Romania), casting director and producer Francine Maisler (U.S.), director and screenwriter Carla Simón (Spain), and director and producer Johnnie To.

“Art College 1994” is set in China in the 1990s. It follows a group of young people who “prepare to face a world caught between tradition and modernity,” according to the festival. The film, represented for world sales by Memento Intl., was originally destined for Cannes, but Liu and the film were reported to have faced bureaucratic obstacles, which put the kibosh on those plans. The director...

A version of this review first ran during the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.

When you saw Joaquin Phoenix dancing down those outdoor steps toward the end of “Joker,” you probably didn’t think about Princess Elsa belting out “Let It Go” in the 2013 animated film “Frozen.” But Mark Cousins did –- and that’s the difference between him and you and me and the rest of the people who see Cousins make that juxtaposition in his documentary “The Story of Film: A New Generation.”

Cousins ties Joker and Elsa together because of the defiance at the heart of his dance and her song, and he does so at the start of “The Story of Film: A New Generation.” The documentary was an extraordinarily apt film to screen on the opening afternoon of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, which came 14 months after the pandemic had forced the festival to cancel its 2020 edition. The...

The Story of Film: A New Generation opens at two dozen theaters this weekend — Laemmle Royal in LA, Museum of the Moving Image in NY, Music Box Theatre in Chicago and Brattle in Cambridge. It’s a mix of arthouses, cinematheques, museums and even a few multiplexes for Mark Cousins’ follow-up to his 15-hour, 2011 opus The Story Of Film: An Odyssey. (This one clocks a relatively brief three hours.)

Several theaters are programming repertory series with the release, “which we feel will elevate its profile and continue the conversation,” said Kyle Westphal, head of theatrical sales for Music Box Films, the distributor for both installments.

A New Generation debuted at Cannes to strong reviews, Deadline’s here. Now, Westphal said, the first film, only available in standard definition, has been remastered in HD and both works will be released in a Blu-ray box set. The earlier work, which essentially played...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

The series “Woman as Witch” offers 35mm prints of von Sternberg’s Dishonored and Alan Rudolph’s rarely screened Remember My Name.

Bam

In advance of her debut feature The African Desperate, Martine Syms has curated a series of influences—among them Spike Lee’s Girl 6, Paprika, and Happy Together.

Film Forum

A Miloš Forman retrospective celebrates the filmmaker’s 90th birthday; “Loving Highsmith” has its second weekend with Purple Noon, Strangers on a Train, and The American Friend; restorations of Alain Resnais’ The War Is Over and Carnal Knowledge continue.

Film at Lincoln Center

Three Colors: Blue, Three Colors: White, and Three Colors: Red all play in new 4K restorations.

Museum of the Moving Image

One of Johnnie To’s best films, Vengeance, screens on Friday as part of a retrospective on The Story of Film, while...

Here’s a film documentary that feels like a time-travel machine. But we’re not escaping into the past — the past is coming to us.

In “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock,” film-besotted documentarian Mark Cousins hopscotches through the Master of Suspense’s body of work based on ideas and images, not your typical film-by-film chronological approach. He’s made hyperlinked connections throughout Hitchcock’s whole filmography (clips from almost every one of his films appear) to show that these works are not of the past: They remain eternally present tense.

To do that, Cousins presents us with a magnificent trick: making it seem as if Hitchcock is narrating the documentary and guiding you through his work and through the themes you might not otherwise notice. Impressionist Alistair McGowan portrays Hitch in the voiceover and has him down completely, from the sharp intake of breath to the almost-snort that precedes him...

Right at the beginning of The March On Rome, a special screening in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival, Mark Cousins draws our collective gaze to a piece of graffiti saying that cinema is the most powerful weapon of all. It isn’t clear — to me, anyway — whether that joyful proclamation dates back to 1922, when Benito Mussolini led a Fascist march from Naples to Rome, or to some other eruption of historical optimism. Cinema isn’t as powerful as all that — if it were, Fascism would have been clobbered to a pulp by Chaplin, Lubitsch and all the other filmmakers who lampooned its vainglorious leaders. But images do matter. They certainly mattered to Italian Fascism.

Mussolini was hellbent on taking over Italy “with love if possible, by force if necessary,” a neat phrase much repeated in Cousins’ film essay. He marched on Rome as an invader. Meanwhile,...

In “The March on Rome,” which world premieres in the Venice Days sidebar of Venice Film Festival Wednesday, Northern Irish-Scottish filmmaker Mark Cousins tracks the ascent of fascism in Italy in the 1920s, and its fall-out across 1930s Europe. He also draws a dotted line from those events to the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in January 2021.

The documentary, illustrated with archive footage and Cousins’ characteristic cinematic analysis, starts with Donald Trump defending his decision to retweet a quote from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” Later in the film, Cousins inserts footage of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol, hoping to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

The issue of the Mussolini quote made a strong impression on Cousins at the time. “I remember seeing that thing on TV and thinking, ‘Wow, he’s actually not denouncing Mussolini,...

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Mark Cousins has traveled the world in pursuit of his artistic visions. I believe The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) is the only complete work of his that I've seen, but what an ambitious, beautiful, sprawling piece of art that is, covering the entire history of film in a series of episodes that prompt a new look at familiar films, as well as those that have been less favored over the years. I wrote the words above as part of my review of The Story of Looking, an extremely personal documentary by the filmmaker that debuted last year. His latest project is The Story of Film: A New Generation. The official synopsis goes into extended detail: "A decade after...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

"Do you watch movies to be sped up, or dazzled, or to see anew?" Music Box Films has revealed an official trailer for a documentary on modern cinema titled The Story of Film: A New Generation, opening in theaters in September. This is a follow-up to cinephile Mark Cousins' fascinating doc series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which originally debuted in 2011 just over a decade ago. He's already back with a full update. "An unashamed celebration of cinema as an art-form: Cousins is an aesthete," one review states. This time, Mark Cousins offers hope and optimism while he explores different movies and talks about how technology is changing the course of cinema in a new century and how Covid-19 continues the process and has allowed filmmakers to create even more unique work. Made during the pandemic, this New Generation doc first premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival last year...

Award winning film director and historian Mark Cousins (“The Story of Film: A New Generation”) is at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios making a doc titled “March on Rome” that will explore the roots of fascism by analyzing films, photographs, and other documents found in Italian archives.

The high-profile documentary — pegged to the centennial of the infamous late October 1922 insurrection by which Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy — will take its cue from the Fascist propaganda film “A Noi” by director Umberto Paradisi, produced in 1923 as an official Fascist party document celebrating the March on Rome.

Italian writer and director Tony Saccucci (“The Duce’s Boxer”), who originated the project and did meticulous research for it, serves as a co-writer with Cousins. Saccuci cross-checked Paradisi’s film with other sources of the time to reveal details of the pic that provide a completely new take on the history of those dramatic days,...

Ten years after Mark Cousins created The Story of Film: An Odyssey, his compelling 15-hour history of cinema, the filmmaker has graced us with a sequel, The Story of Film: A New Generation. At 2hrs and 40 minutes, it is a sweeping topography of 21st century cinema, referencing some 97 films from Britain and America to Senegal and India. An absorbing, informative and even therapeutic experience, I have to concur with our critic Jo-Ann Titmarsh when she says it is,“a true celebration of what cinema is and what it means to us”.

Ever the busy and nomadic filmmaker, Mark was kind enough to speak with me about his new film, his cinema-going habits, the defining films of the 2010s, and the future of the theatrical experience.

Jh: A New Generation covers an impressive breadth of international films. How many films do you watch per month and year? Are you a grazer or a binger?...

Helen du Toit, who served as artistic director of the Palm Springs International Film Festival for over a decade, will lead the newly launched Blue Mountain Film Festival as executive and artistic director.

The festival, located at popular Canadian tourist destination Blue Mountain Village, Southern Ontario, will take place June 1-5 and is sponsored by Blue Mountain Resort.

Th festival will unspool in the village conference centre and will feature up to 25 feature films from across the globe — with a spotlight on Ontario productions — programmed by du Toit.

Helen du Toit said: “When I first stepped foot in Blue Mountain my immediate thought was what an incredible location it would be to host an intimate film festival. Such a unique place calls for a unique experience. I am honored to be part of the team launching Bmff and to curate a diverse program with the best films from around the...

Former Palm Springs artistic director Helen du Toit has been set as executive and artistic director of new Canadian film festival Blue Mountain Film Festival.

The event in Southern Ontario’s scenic Blue Mountain resort is set to take place June 1-5, 2022, at the Blue Mountain Village Conference Centre.

Inspired and curated by du Toit, who served as Palm Springs head for more than a decade, the plan is to showcase around 25 features from across the globe, with a spotlight on Ontario productions. There will also be an industry platform called the Creative Forum which will take place from June 1 to 3.

Du Toit said: “When I first stepped foot in Blue Mountain my immediate thought was what an incredible location it would be to host an intimate film festival. Such a unique place calls for a unique experience. I am honoured to be part of the team launching Bmff and...

As the face (sometimes) and voice (always) of an amuse-bouche of TV shows, film criticism (in his column for Sight and Sound), and documentaries over the last thirty years, the Belfast-born, Edinburgh-based filmmaker Mark Cousins has occupied a unique place in the film landscape while seldom being, it’s fair to say, to everybody’s tastes. “People think I’m a bit daft” Cousins frankly admits to himself, and to us, in his new docu-essay The Story of Looking, a deeply personal film that might just hit enough right notes to enamor even his fiercest detractors.

Whether hosting “Moviedrone” in the late ‘90s (a gig he took over from the great Alex Cox) or his excellent “Scene By Scene” interview series for the BBC, Cousins’ early forays into television remain the most widely liked work of his career. His magnum opus The Story of Film, a 15-hour series from 2011 that...

Exclusive: Cohen Media Group and Curzon have jointly acquired all U.S., U.K. and Irish distribution rights to Mark Cousins’ Cannes Film Festival documentary The Storms Of Jeremy Thomas about the Oscar-winning producer of The Last Emperor.

A theatrical release is expected later in 2021 for the movie, which is a David P. Kelly Films production.

In The Storms Of Jeremy Thomas, filmmaker and writer Mark Cousins (The Story Of Film: An Odyssey) accompanies legendary producer Thomas on the latter’s annual pilgrimage to the Cannes Film Festival.

Each year for the last 45 years, Thomas has made the journey to Cannes. This time Cousins is along for the off-beat grand tour on sea and land, chatting with Thomas as they take in landmarks and people connected to the producer’s films and life, from the Paris locations of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers,...

Film festivals often present such a hodgepodge of stories that the perception of a common thread is usually a short-lived illusion, but several premieres in Venice and Telluride reflect a world faced to confront its mortality. Movies made over the last 18 months demonstrate acute personal qualities that bear the undeniable stamp of the pandemic.

In Paolo Sorrentino’s compassionate coming-of-age drama “The Hand of God,” the director delivers a tender ode to his traumatic teen years, when the sudden death of his parents forced him to sort out his place in a cruel universe. The movie reads as a biographical justification for the movies he’s made throughout his career and provides an excuse to revisit them in a new light.

Sorrentino’s sudden orphanhood influenced his decision to become a filmmaker, yet even the swooning collection of colorful Italian creatives in his Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty” seemed to dance...

The logical conclusion of one man’s perpetual quest to make sure the world is never robbed of even one of his precious thoughts, “The Story of Looking” is little more than a polished vlog. Mixing (literal) naked introspection with his usual one-man-show movie philosophizing, director/narrator/subject/center of the universe, Mark Cousins, explores the concept of “looking” in both the physical and the spiritual sense. This exploration rarely leaves room for anything except Mark, though, and much like his “The Story of Film” installments, it acts as little more than a platform for one person’s free-form epiphanies.

Continue reading ‘The Story of Looking’ Peers No Further Than One Man’s Self-Indulgent Purview [Telluride Review] at The Playlist.

This review of “The Year of the Everlasting Storm” was first published after the film’s July premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

In a way, Mark Cousins’ “The Story of Film: A New Generation” was the ideal film to be the first screening at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, because the documentary surveyed the most groundbreaking cinema of the 21st century and looked ahead to celebrate the return of moviegoers to theaters as the pandemic receded. But “The Year of the Everlasting Storm,” which premiered days later at Cannes, may be a perfect bookend to come as the festival nears its conclusion.

Whereas “The Story of Film” pointed the way toward the future as we come out of tough times, “Everlasting Storm” uses seven great filmmakers to peer deeply into where we’ve been during the pandemic, and where we may still be today; it’s set in the immediate past,...

Plus additional deals for Italy, Spain, Japan, China.

Mark Cousins’ documentary The Story Of Film: A New Generation has scored sales deals for territories including North America, through UK-based sales agency Dogwoof.

The film has sold to North America (Music Box Films), Italy (I Wonder), Spain (Avalon), Japan (Twin) and China (DDDream). Discussions are in advanced stages for Australia, Germany, France and Benelux.

The film had its world premiere as a Special Presentation on day one of Cannes Film Festival last month.

A follow-up to Cousins’ 2011 The Story Of Film: An Odyssey, the documentary covers filmmaking from 2010 to 2021, taking in...

To mark the release of The Story of Film: An Odyssey on 26th July, we’ve been given 2 copies to give away on Blu-ray.

Celebrating its tenth anniversary and released in high definition for the first time, The Story of Film: An Odyssey, written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Mark Cousins, is a landmark documentary on international film told through the history of cinematic innovation, which has influenced film teaching around the world.

Five years in the making, The Story of Film: An Odyssey covers six continents and 12 decades, showing how film-makers are influenced both by the historical events of their times, and by each other. It provides a worldwide, guided tour of the greatest movies ever made; an epic tale that starts in nickelodeons and ends as a multi-billion dollar globalised digital industry.

Please note: This competition is open to UK residents only

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As the U.K.’s most noted and prolific documentarian of cinema, Mark Cousins has lent his deep knowledge of films and filmmaking — alongside his distinct poetic voiceover tones — to numerous celebrations of the big screen.

Something of a Cannes veteran, having chalked up almost a quarter century of visits (his feature The Eyes of Orson Welles premiered on the Croisette in 2019), this year sees Cousins present two new documentaries.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which was made during the pandemic (one of three films — “I work fast!” he says) and examines recent on- and off-screen innovations in ...

As the U.K.’s most noted and prolific documentarian of cinema, Mark Cousins has lent his deep knowledge of films and filmmaking — alongside his distinct poetic voiceover tones — to numerous celebrations of the big screen.

Something of a Cannes veteran, having chalked up almost a quarter century of visits (his feature The Eyes of Orson Welles premiered on the Croisette in 2019), this year sees Cousins present two new documentaries.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey, which was made during the pandemic (one of three films — “I work fast!” he says) and examines recent on- and off-screen innovations in ...

Irish documentarian Mark Cousins is in a jovial mood. He has two films in Cannes and the first one debuted on opening day, “The Story of Film: A New Generation.” It’s a wide-ranging update to his 15-hour film-school staple “The Story of Film: An Odyssey” (the new one is a slimmer two hours and 20 minutes). Cannes director Thierry Fremaux felt that Cousins’ new film could provide a welcome transition for moviegoers as the festival returned after two years. Indeed, reviews are raves and sales agent Dogwoof is fielding offers.

“Lockdown happened,” said Cousins on Zoom from his home office in Edinburgh just before the festival. “A lot of us had more thinking time and creative time. So I made three films.” His portrait of radical British producer, “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas,” will play in Cannes Classics. The third is a personal documentary based on his 2018 history of the visual world,...

Irish documentarian Mark Cousins is in a jovial mood. He has two films in Cannes and the first one debuted on opening day, “The Story of Film: A New Generation.” It’s a wide-ranging update to his 15-hour film-school staple “The Story of Film: An Odyssey” (the new one is a slimmer two hours and 20 minutes). Cannes director Thierry Fremaux felt that Cousins’ new film could provide a welcome transition for moviegoers as the festival returned after two years. Indeed, reviews are raves and sales agent Dogwoof is fielding offers.

“Lockdown happened,” said Cousins on Zoom from his home office in Edinburgh just before the festival. “A lot of us had more thinking time and creative time. So I made three films.” His portrait of radical British producer, “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas,” will play in Cannes Classics. The third is a personal documentary based on his 2018 history of the visual world,...

Rather than using the excuse of a pandemic to slow down, the indefatigable and hugely prolific director Mark Cousins has instead speeded up his output. This is the first of two films he has screening in Cannes, while two more finished films are in the pipeline. It was fitting that his latest venture, a follow-up to The Story of Film: An Odyssey, was the first screening of the Cannes Film Festival for it is a celebration of this millennium’s cinema and is a sweeping, vast and loving look at the recent past and potential future of film.

Cousins has taken a slightly different approach with this instalment: gone are the interviews with filmmakers. In their stead, we have a slew of film clips – from 97 films! – that speak for themselves. While Cannes critics and film buffs will recognise a host of winners from previous festivals – Shoplifters and Parasite making notable...

This story about “The Story of Film: A New Generation” first appeared in TheWrap’s special digital Cannes magazine.

It’s hard to envision a more appropriate movie for the opening night of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival than Mark Cousins’ “The Story of Film: A New Generation.” The two-hour-and-40-minute documentary is a vast but idiosyncratic examination of the cinema of the 21st century, beginning with the unusual juxtaposition of Joaquin Phoenix’s stairway dance in “Joker” with the song “Let It Go” from “Frozen.” From there, the survey jumps across genres and countries, with Cousins discussing around 90 different films as he examines the way cinema has extended its language and gone in new directions over the last two decades.

But in addition to being a wry treatise on the movies of this century, the film is also a celebration of the moviegoing experience made during a time of isolation...

Even with all the havoc the coronavirus wreaked in the world, cinema could not be stopped, so why should Mark Cousins, the solicitous Irish critic-cum-tour guide whose 15-hour “The Story of Film: An Odyssey” was but a tip-of-the-iceberg survey of the medium’s infinite possibilities?

Making the most of his time in lockdown, Cousins compiled an appendix/capper to that marathon series, delivering “The Story of Film: A New Generation” on opening day of the Cannes Film Festival. This latest installment (doubtful the last) is less focused on where the medium’s been than on where it’s headed, focusing mostly on 21st-century examples, from Attenberg to Zama, that point the way forward.

At two hours and 40 minutes, it’s a longer epilogue than audiences needed perhaps, but then, no one would accuse Cousins of brevity. And for those who appreciate the director’s wide-eyed and open-hearted way of looking at cinema,...

Leos Carax’s Annette is the much publicized and awaited opening film of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival kicking off tonight, but actually it is filmmaker Mark Cousins who can claim the glory of being the first film of the festival this year, and it just wrapped up its premiere screening this afternoon at the Debussy.

When fest director Thierry Fremaux saw The Story of Film: A New Generation, Cousins’ mouthwatering and mesmerizing two-hour, 40-minute tribute to recent cinema, he knew it was just what was needed for this year’s fest — the first in over two years and moved to July from May because of the lingering effects of the world pandemic that forced cancellation in 2020 of the all-important Cannes event for the first time since World War II. The aftermath of that pandemic is also part of Cousins’ sweeping survey of cinema spanning 2010-21 as a way of uncovering...

In his latest discursive love letter to cinema, documentarian Mark Cousins notes that essay films “take ideas for a walk.” The walk he takes us on here is a beauty, a dreamscape crafted from a decade’s worth of mind-bending ideas and innovative screen creations. The Story of Film: A New Generation sometimes has the unhurried flow of a friendly saunter, and sometimes it rushes headlong around corners, where jaw-dropping surprises await.

Having surveyed the first century of filmmaking with his 15-part The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Cousins turns his restless and impassioned explorations to the 10 years since that 2011 series’ ...

In his latest discursive love letter to cinema, documentarian Mark Cousins notes that essay films “take ideas for a walk.” The walk he takes us on here is a beauty, a dreamscape crafted from a decade’s worth of mind-bending ideas and innovative screen creations. The Story of Film: A New Generation sometimes has the unhurried flow of a friendly saunter, and sometimes it rushes headlong around corners, where jaw-dropping surprises await.

Having surveyed the first century of filmmaking with his 15-part The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Cousins turns his restless and impassioned explorations to the 10 years since that 2011 series’ ...

A decade after producing his epic 15-hour series “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” Mark Cousins has created another cinematic survey of Homeric proportions.

In ”The Story of Film: A New Generation,” whose international distribution is handled by Dogwoof Sales, the writer and filmmaker applies a wide lens to the last 10 years of cinema, asking where filmmakers have pushed the language of storytelling, and where they have blown it up entirely.

Using snippets from Hollywood and Bollywood bangers like “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and “Pk,” from VR masterpieces like “The Deserted,” and from urgent docs like Syria’s “For Sama,” Cousins fashions a compelling, ultimately optimistic collage on where cinema has been, and where it’s going next.

Cousins is set to unveil “A New Generation” at a special Cannes Film Festival screening on Tuesday, but before that, he caught up with Variety to discuss the challenges of making his...

Mark Cousins is kind of a film historian who makes amazing, long, expansive docs about cinema. He is best known for his 15-hour documentary from 2011, “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” and now he’s made a follow-up to it, titled “The Story of Film: A New Generation.”

Read More: Cannes First Looks: ‘Red Rocket,’ The Souvenir II,’ ‘After Yang,’ ‘Titane’ & More

With the upcoming premiere of Mark Cousin’s highly anticipated ‘Story of Film’ follow-up, ‘A New Generation,’ at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, we’re thrilled to give our readers an exclusive look at a clip from the documentary.

Continue reading ‘The Story Of Film: A New Generation’ Exclusive: Watch The First Clip & Check Out The Poster To Mark Cousins New Cannes Film at The Playlist.

Mark Cousins joins iconic producer on annual road trip to Cannes.

Visit Films has boarded worldwide rights on Mark Cousins’ Cannes Classics documentary The Storms Of Jeremy Thomas.

Cousins joins Thomas on the producer’s annual road trip from London to the Cannes Film Festival as he recalls some of his most iconic films like Bernardo Bertolucci’s multiple Oscar winner The Last Emperor, David Cronenberg’s Crash, and Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing.

Thomas discusses Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, and David Bowie, and the journey is interspersed with commentary from Tilda Swinton and Debra Winger, and features a range of film clips.

The Story of Film: A New Generation Photo: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival The final part of a portmanteau masterwork dedicated to the history of cinema by Mark Cousins, an Irish-Scottish filmmaker and author, will be showcased at the Cannes Film Festival on 6 July.

Cousins’ films, including The First Movie, The Story of Film: An Odyssey, The Eyes of Orson Welles and Women Make Film have been presented all over the world, and in particular over the years in Cannes.

During the health crisis, the filmmaker worked on the production of the final chapter of his 15-part documentary exploring the history of cinema. The Cannes organisers say that with audiences returning to the big screen this summer, this final chapter, named The Story of Film: a New Generation, poses an important question: where were the filmmakers when everything stopped?

Face in the crowd at a Festival screening: Mark Cousins, centre,...

You might find yourself looking at the world in a very different way after watching Mark Cousins’ latest documentary “The Story of Looking,” the closing night film of this year’s Sheffield DocFest.

It’s an uplifting meditation on the power of looking, all at a time when we are more assailed by images than ever. The film begins as Cousins is preparing for surgery to restore his vision, and sees him explore the role that visual experience plays in our lives. It’s a kaleidoscopic, idiosyncratic and deeply personal project – almost a call for the viewer to embrace the “mindfulness” of looking.

Cousins has been making films for more than 30 years, including the Peabody Award winning 15-hour “The Story of Film: An Odyssey.”

He thinks we’re living through a golden age of documentaries, although it’s not without problems.

On the plus side, as filmmaking kit has become more accessible,...

During lockdown multi-prized film director and historian Mark Cousins found out he had a problem with his eyesight. He decided to turn it into a film in which he imagines “the momentous role that looking has played in his own life and the history of humanity,” as the logline reads.

Cousins’ latest film, which is based on his book “The Story of Looking,” is being presented as a work-in-progress at Switzerland’s Visions du Réel festival. It marks the latest of several film essays from Cousins who made his name with the Peabody Award winning 15-hour “The Story of Film: An Odyssey.” His “Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema” scored the award for innovative storytelling at the European Film Awards last December. Cousins also won a special Cannes Camera d’Or commendation in 2018 for “The Eyes of Orson Welles.”

“The Story of Looking,” which is produced by...

There’s an accepted story we tell ourselves about the history of the movies, which goes something like this: Technological inventions in the late 1800s lead to a new type of mass entertainment and a burgeoning art form in the early part of the 20th century. Though the epicenter and main exporter of moviemaking is earmarked by many to be Hollywood, USA, this “moving pictures” phenomenon spreads far and wide outside of America’s borders — not just in France (who’ve been making films since the very beginning and is...

“Women Make Film.” The title of Irish film savant Mark Cousins’ sprawling 14-hour follow-up to “The Story of Film” serves both as a statement of fact and, if punctuated slightly differently, a call to action: “Women, Make Film!”

Where the earlier documentary was a monumental survey of the medium, attempting to cram its entire history into a single project, with footage shot through the windshields of cars on nearly every continent. He and editor Timo Langer have assembled montage upon montage of magic moments, the vast majority plucked from films even I was unfamiliar with, amounting to an invaluable film appreciation workshop. It’s ideal for those with open minds and eclectic tastes, such as festival audiences and subscribers of Turner Classic Movies and The Criterion Channel, where the film can be absorbed in bite-size chunks.

“This is a film school of sorts in which all the teachers are women,...

It will focus on 60 films “that really mattered” from the last ten years.

Dogwoof is to handle world sales on UK filmmaker Mark Cousins’ documentary project The Story Of Film: A New Generation.

It is the follow-up to his 15-hour 2011 film essay The Story Of Film: An Odyssey and surveys films made in the last decade.

The film is now in production with an expected delivery of early 2021. Dogwoof sales will showcase a promo to buyers at this year’s Cannes’ virtual Marche du Film on June 22.

Directed and written by Cousins and produced by John Archer for Hopscotch films,...