The First Movie

Part documentary, part essay, part contemporary memoir.

From watching short films within a film, from watching an young audience watch feature films for the first time on the big screen, Mark Cousins ‘the first movie’ is a multi-layered film, which creates a ‘real’ cinema experience for the viewer never seen before, in a very innovative way.

During the screening’s Q & A, a nine year old girl told Cousins, ‘I always thought of Iraq as a bad country but I will now be saying good things about it.’ Through his own presence on screen and in his own voiceover, Cousins begins his film with no titles to indicate location, to avoid stereotypical images which are most of the time created by the press, therefore allowing the audience to view the film freely without any preconceived images. Cousins talks of his original upbringing in Belfast but only for a ‘wee’ minute, rather than create a formulaic doc where the filmmakers life is similar to what he is witnessing, whilst cutting back and forth, Mark avoids this cliché approach and instead allows the images being seen around him and by the kids, in the small of Goptapa, to speak for themselves.

Whilst Cousins film may be about his own identity, to this small town and these kids, the film becomes an entirely selfless film, about so many other things. A child’s spirit in a country torn apart by war, as the children play with balloons, a scene more moving than watching a plastic bag dance in the wind. A child’s imagination as they talk the kind of stories and genres they would make films about, talking of comedy and love. A celebration of cinema as Cousins set up a cinema, showing them films that he considers to be the best children’s films ever made, amongst them Astrid Henning-Jensen's Danish film Palle Alone in the World (1949), about a little boy who wakes up in the world without grown-ups. The children stare in awe at the screen, laugh and attempt to touch images flying off the screen, as they are taken away into the world of storytelling.

Cousins gives three of the children he meets whilst filming, their own cameras to play with, one of which comes back with footage of a child playing with mud in water, for a duration of one minute and twenty two seconds, with a narration by the young boy filming him. The short instanteous piece of film is more incredible, moving, real and multi-layered than any filmmaker can ever truly imagine to achieve after years of preparation. Whilst Cousins film is uplifting, sad and moving, it never overplays any elements by being too over dramatic or oversentimental. The film movie is real, based on real lives, in a real town, within a real country all captured in a real, entertaining, simple, open-minded, open-hearted and thought provoking way.