Is a documentary filmmaker, author and curator. His films have dealt with subjects such as neo-Nazism, childhood imagination and the cinema of Iran. His feature The First Movie won the Prix Italia, and is playing in cinemas around the world. His new movie The Story of Film: An Odyssey has taken six years to make. Cousins has published several books, including Imagining Reality, The Faber Book of Documentary (as co-editor), the acclaimed book The Story of Film, published in Europe, the United States and Asia, and most recently, the collection of essays on cinema: Watching Real People Elsewhere. Cousins took the Edinburgh International Film Festival to Sarajevo during that city's siege. He was co-artistic director of Cinema China, and of the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, part of his ongoing collaboration with Tilda Swinton. They recently devised a cinema in Beijing and did A Pilgrimage, in which they pulled a cinema across Scotland. He is honorary doctor of letters at the University of Edinburgh. In the past, Cousins directed and presented the BBC's Scene by Scene, which ran for five years, screening career interviews with, among others, Martin Scorsese, Jane Russell, Paul Schrader, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Roman Polanski, Jeanne Moreau and Rod Steiger. In 2001 he drove from Scotland to India in his campervan.
Is a documentary filmmaker, author and curator. His films have dealt with subjects such as neo-Nazism, childhood imagination and the cinema of Iran. His feature The First Movie won the Prix Italia, and is playing in cinemas around the world. His new movie The Story of Film: An Odyssey has taken six years to make. Cousins has published several books, including Imagining Reality, The Faber Book of Documentary (as co-editor), the acclaimed book The Story of Film, published in Europe, the United States and Asia, and most recently, the collection of essays on cinema: Watching Real People Elsewhere. Cousins took the Edinburgh International Film Festival to Sarajevo during that city's siege. He was co-artistic director of Cinema China, and of the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, part of his ongoing collaboration with Tilda Swinton. They recently devised a cinema in Beijing and did A Pilgrimage, in which they pulled a cinema across Scotland. He is honorary doctor of letters at the University of Edinburgh. In the past, Cousins directed and presented the BBC's Scene by Scene, which ran for five years, screening career interviews with, among others, Martin Scorsese, Jane Russell, Paul Schrader, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Roman Polanski, Jeanne Moreau and Rod Steiger. In 2001 he drove from Scotland to India in his campervan.
