{"id":475499,"date":"2026-06-13T14:20:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T14:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/475499\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T14:20:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T14:20:14","slug":"i-cried-a-lot-making-it-belfast-filmmaker-mark-cousins-on-his-epic-new-16-hour-documentary-the-irish-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/475499\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I cried a lot making it\u2019: Belfast filmmaker Mark Cousins on his epic new 16-hour documentary \u2013 The Irish News"},"content":{"rendered":"

IT took five years of graft, passion and tears – not to mention countless flights to Brazil, Japan, China, Europe and the US – but finally, master filmmaker Mark Cousins, will land back in his native Belfast this month to unveil (part of) his new 16-hour epic The Story of Documentary Film.<\/p>\n

Already lauded at the Sundance, Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals, it will be a chance for local audiences to soak up the first chapter of a \u201cglobal story\u201d which zooms in all that was happening in the early 1900s up to 1929 \u2013 in cinematic terms. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was definitely hard work, but it felt timely,\u201d says Cousins from his home in Edinburgh. \u201cI didn\u2019t really want to go back and do another history of documentaries, but the time feels right.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started making this about five years ago, but as you know, fake news came along, Donald Trump came along, AI came along\u2026.so it\u2019s harder, in a way, to believe our eyes. That said, maybe it\u2019s a good time to do a deep dive into documentaries which have mostly been trying to be honest about the world and tell us about what it\u2019s like to be alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"‘I<\/a>\"Sir<\/a>\"MarkSean Connery with Belfast filmmaker Mark Cousins <\/p>\n

It was expansive subject matter to cover – from the end of the 19th Century to modern day \u2013 but, as ever, Cousins breaks it down into stylish, tasteful, palatable chunks. \u201cIt is a big story,\u201d he allows. \u201cIf you ask yourself how cinema has told us about ourselves, it\u2019s a big, complicated thing, but I enjoyed the challenge.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s now harder to believe our eyes<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Mark Cousins<\/p>\n

\u201cI have made 24 feature-length films and I think 40 shorts, but this has been one of the hardest to make because you are dealing with real world problems. There is a lot of war and atrocity and so I cried a lot as I was editing, but I think people who watch it to the end will be enriched by it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlso, I think the theme of my films is recovery \u2013 people get better, people are resilient. Overall, I am an optimist, even though there are load of reasons for being depressed about the world.\u201d <\/p>\n

Read more: Docs Ireland bringing documentaries, discussion and deal-making back to Belfast \u2013 The Irish News<\/a><\/p>\n

The Belfast screening \u2013 part of the Docs Ireland international documentary film festival \u2013 will focus on the \u201cmagic moments\u201d captured in film of 1920s Paris and Berlin and of the Russian revolution, as well as what was happening locally with the industrialisation of Belfast \u2013 alongside sectarian riots.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was such a fervent time and I have tried to capture that dynamism of the beginning of the 20th century,\u201d says Cousins, whose prolific output over the years (he is now 61) includes The Story of Film: An Odyssey; I am Belfast and The March on Rome \u2013 the latter the subject of an unsuccessful banning attempt by the Italian government.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a brilliant time and an awful time \u2013 but you could say the same about today. The full spectrum of life is there and documentary has never shied away from the sad things as well as the wondrous things, so that is what people will see.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MarkMark Cousins filming in Kurdistan <\/p>\n

For the award-winning filmmaker and author (his books include Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary and The Story of Looking), it is about \u201ctrying to be passionate about what movies can do\u201d \u2013 and what they can show us about ourselves.<\/p>\n

Read more: Belfast-born film director Mark Cousins to release book \u2013 The Irish News<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBack then, there was no easyJet, people couldn\u2019t go anywhere,\u201d he says, \u201cso people lived in a kind of bell jar. Then suddenly, this art form called documentary came along which showed you what it was like to live in other worlds, what it was like to be an Inuit guy in the north of Canada or what it was like to be in Paris, in the Arctic or in Moscow. This was dazzling. This was the easyJet of its time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MarkMark Cousins and Tilda Swinton on A Pilgrimage <\/p>\n

A graduate of Film and the Visual Arts at Stirling University, Scotland, he started directing in the 1980s, but a love affair with film goes back further than that \u2013 right back to his childhood, growing up in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy passion for this art form came at an early age,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIt was partly because, like many kids, I wasn\u2019t great at words, but I had a really good visual memory and when I saw a film, I remembered it completely. It all started with an Orson Wells film called Touch of Evil which I watched on TV when we had moved from Belfast to Antrim.<\/p>\n

\u201cYears later, I was in Michigan in the US and this woman came up to me and said: I am Orson Wells\u2019 daughter and I would like you to make a film about my father\u2019 \u2013 and I did. These kind of journeys, from working class Antrim to Orson Well\u2019s daughter, have always been fun for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

His work in film led to meeting many famous people, but rather than being starstruck when hanging out with the likes of Janet Leigh (Psycho) and Jack Lemmon (Some Like It Hot) or, closer to home, Tilda Swinton (with whom he pulled a mobile cinema across the Scottish Highlands as a \u201ctug of love, cinema pilgrimage\u201d in 2009), it was his Hollywood celebrity friends who ended up being impressed by this new director on the block.<\/p>\n

\"MarkMark Cousins with Jane Fonda <\/p>\n

\u201cI got to interview many famous people over the years \u2013 I stopped doing that 25 years ago,\u201d he says, \u201cbut it was brilliant and fascinating, especially because I came from working class Northern Ireland and I didn\u2019t have fancy connections or anything. <\/p>\n

\u201cI became friends with these people, I was going to the pub with them or having burger and chips with them in New York or Edinburgh. I think it was slightly unusual for these big stars to meet an Irish-Scottish 20-something director who sort of knew their whole careers inside out and back to front and they were sort of impressed by that.\u201d <\/p>\n

A fan of naked night-time swimming, he tells how he once encouraged celebrity visitors to Edinburgh Film Festival \u201cwhose names I won\u2019t mention\u201d to try it with him when he was festival director in the mid-90s.<\/p>\n

\u201cLots of us have difficulty dialling ourselves down,\u201d Cousins explains, \u201cso even though I was director of this big fancy festival in Edinburgh, I would say to people: \u2018Who wants to go swimming naked?\u2019 and there would be lots of willing participants. We would head up to Dunsapie Loch near Arthur\u2019s Seat in Edinburgh and swim naked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a freedom in doing that \u2013 and it is always a great leveller. It was means of just \u2018letting go\u2019. I was always interested in letting myself go \u2013 and I still am.\u201d<\/p>\n

Currently, the heavily tattooed (with names of his artistic heroes) avant garde director, who has been known to show his more controversial films underground (Bigger Than The Shining), is \u2018letting go\u2019 in a new direction by writing an opera.<\/p>\n

\"MarkMark Cousins with actor Tilda Swinton <\/p>\n

It was, he tells me, conceived during a very uncomfortable flight when his tall frame was squished into one of the cheap seats \u201cin 38F or somewhere\u201d, during which he spent the entire time fantasising about being in a bath. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a totally new departure for me, but I am always looking for the next story…you just want to see something that moves you,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I really do love baths.\u201d<\/p>\n

:: The Story of Documentary Film by Mark Cousins will show at Queen\u2019s Film Theatre, Belfast, on June 20 as part of the Docs Ireland Festival. Full programme at docsireland.ie\/programme\/whats-on\/ <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IT took five years of graft, passion and tears – not to mention countless flights to Brazil, Japan,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-475499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}