First Impressions

Belfast, it's a city that is changing, changing because the people are leaving? But one came back, a 10,000 year old woman who claims that she is the city itself.

A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.

Abbas Kiarostami is the most acclaimed Iranian film director whose films have won prizes all around the world. In this film he gives a rare and frank interview about his work, and journeys out of Tehran to meet Babk Ahmadpoor the now grown up star of his famous trilogy which started with Where is the Friends House. On the journey Kiarostami picks up the camera himself, producing images of pure poetry.

As he prepares for surgery to restore his vision, Mark Cousins explores the role that visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visible world, a kaleidoscope of extraordinary imagery across cultures and eras. At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of the human experience, empathy, discovery and thought. He shares the pleasure and pain of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to the other lookers for their vision from lockdown, and he travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.

Mark Cousins invites film actors and directors to watch major scenes in their career to date, and to talk us through them.

A young man's swirling thoughts as he contemplates the murder of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini shortly after the deed takes place.

In Kino Klassika’s first film commission, British filmmaker Mark Cousins imagines a conversation between D.H.Lawrence and Sergei Eisenstein. This playful film essay carries forward Mark’s film dialogue with Eisenstein from his feature film about Eisenstein in Mexico ‘What is this film called Love?’

The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.

Orson Welles trained as an artist before he become an actor and director, and continued to draw and paint throughout his career - character sketches, storyboards, set designs, pictures of the people and places that inspired him. These artworks are a sketchbook of his life, and most have never been seen outside his family and close friends. For the first time, award-winning director Mark Cousins has been granted access to this treasure trove of imagery, to make a film about what he finds there - the story of Welles' visual thinking, never before told. An exclusive new perspective on one of the 20th century's greatest creative figures, whose art and life continue to fascinate audiences today.

As told through clips from 183 female directors, this epic revisionist history of the cinema focuses on women’s integral role in the development of film art. Using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and five continents, Mark Cousins asks how films are made, shot and edited; how stories are shaped and how movies depict life, love, politics, humour and death, all through the compelling lens of some of the world’s greatest filmmakers – all of them women.