The First MovieRated Parental Guidance ~ Runs 76 minutes
Dir.: Mark Cousins, UK/Canada, 2009
Digital projection.
“Not many critics also get to be accomplished film-makers, but one such is Mark Cousins, a brilliantly exuberant movie writer... Cousins's tremendous new film, The First Movie is part documentary, part essay, part contemporary memoir, recording his visit to Goptapa in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, which was the subject of a horrendous chemical assault in 1988. Cousins's mission was to film the region and he has some stunning, poetic images and also to talk to the adults and the children there. But not just that. Cousins does not regard these children as the passive object of his camera lens: the exotic and mysterious bearers of innocence, which is how they are so often seen. On the contrary. He asks them to be discerning viewers and even makers of films... Cousins settled them down to watch movies like Palle Alone in the World, about a little boy who wakes up in the world without grown-ups, The Boot, about a little girl who loses one of her red wellington boots, and ET: The Extra Terrestrial. Then he hands out some digital video cameras to the children and asks them to make their own films. The children come back with some remarkable stuff. Some elicit powerful first-person testimony from their mothers and grandmothers about what happened during Saddam's murderous chemical rain. Another child, using a continuously held camera shot, devises a fascinating and revealing fable of a boy who, without friends or toys, confides his hopes, dreams and thoughts to the mud. These are, as it happens, children who have never before seen a film... And all this is interleaved with Cousins's own thoughts about growing up himself in a war zone; Northern Ireland. He says that as meat is tenderised for being battered, so he believes that children need not be hardened by this and that the life of the imagination is what is real, more real than war. This is a terrifically enjoyable and engaging film: open-minded and open-hearted, and utterly unlike the material on regular commercial release.” - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (U.K.). “An achingly lyrical story of honesty, honour and hope in a postwar landscape.” - The Times, London. “An intriguing and inspiring work... More a pro-childhood movie than an anti-war movie, The First Movie celebrates happiness.” - The Belfast Telegraph
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