A Story of Children and Film
Description
As a follow-up to his epic 15-hour documentary series The Story of Film, writer/director/critic Mark Cousins has created a captivating 100-minute companion piece more on the scale of its small-statured subject: children in film. “Kids are so great on camera,” he proclaims in his lilting Scottish narration that gently guides us through a virtual graduate seminar on some of the greatest live-action films about children in world cinema. Cousins has crafted a mesmerizing mosaic of clips from dozens of films both familiar and obscure—from Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982), Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) to Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1985), Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (1995), and Hiroshi Shimizu’s Children in the Wind (1937)—weaving in and out of their narratives to explore the many themes and subtexts that resonate for him. Stories of imagination, dreaming and adventure prove as potent as those of class conflict, violence, loneliness and loss—and balloons, don’t forget the balloons. A simple home video of Cousins’s young niece and nephew playing in their living room serves as a touchstone: a source of memory and inspiration that provides the philosophical and personal counterweight for this understated cinematic essay that will leave you with a long list of films to add to your Netflix queue.
—Joanne Parsont
A native of Northern Ireland, Mark Cousins is a writer, director, curator and film critic who lives in Scotland. He was director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival in the mid-1990s, co-founded the charity Scottish Kids Are Making Movies, and made his directorial debut with The First Movie (2009), about children in Iraq. In 2009, he began a collaboration with Tilda Swinton, launching the 8 ½ Foundation (based on her SFIFF49 State of Cinema address, written as a letter to her 8 ½ year-old son), and produced A Pilgrimage, a traveling film festival on a mobile cinema truck pulled manually across the Scottish Highlands. He has published four books, including The Story of Film, a history of cinema translated into 10 languages, that he turned into a 15-hour documentary series in 2011.
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/90064341?autoplay=1Film Details
Language Various (English, Japanese, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Persian)
Year 2013
Runtime 101
Country UK
Director Mark Cousins
Producer Mary Bell, Adam Dawtrey
Editor Timo Langer
Cinematographer Mark Cousins, Marc Bénoliel
Print Source The Festival Agency/ ed@thefestivalagency.com