Film Review: The First Movie (Dir: Mark Cousins)

9:27p.m., Tue 12 Oct 2010

I had the pleasure of seeing Mark Cousins's film, "The First Movie" at The Phoenix in East Finchley last weekend. It's film that's hard to describe without making it sound worthy but dull - but I'll give it a go.

It's part documentary, part video diary and part essay. It records a visit to Goptapa in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, scene of a series of Saddam's chemical assaults in the late eighties. But this horrific background isn't the thrust of the film - Cousins focuses on the details, the history and geography is hinted at in early voiceovers but he doesn't mention the country by name before the first hour is through. Instead, he documents the stunning scenery, in beautifully framed and lingering still shots. And he focuses on the children - the film is set during Ramadhan and, while the adults stay indoors to endure the long days of fasting, Gop Tapa, he says, seems to belong to the children. He encourages them to interact with the camera, to tell the camer about their lives, their hopes, their dreams.

And then, Cousins and his team set up a ram-shackle cinema with two bed sheets sewed together to act as a screen. He shows the 100 or so children of the village a series of films. The children, who have never watched films of this scale, on this scale, go bonkers - it's a reminder of how powerful the communal experience of cinema can be. They jump up at the screen, grasping as the balloons in "Le Ballon Rouge" float away and cheer and dance as E.T. lifts Elliot and the gang's bicycles into the air.

The second half of the film becomes a collage of films from the kid's point of view as Cousins hands tiny digital HD cameras out asking the children to make their own films. What comes back are joyous, free wheeling films, fuelled with enthusiasm and a disregard for the boundaries of cinematic convention or any technical limitations. The children also elicit, from mothers and grandmothers, remarkable first person accounts of the 'Anfal' - the chemical attacks - responses that Cousins, or any Western interviewer, would never have managed to get. Beyond that, one child manages to wring an enchanting story that Cousins calls "The Boy In The Mud" - a short, sweet, poetic piece, a commentary on life in the region and the hopes and dreams of its children.

If all this sounds twee or contrived, it's not, the film has a lolloping and natural rhythm that endures for the full 80 minutes running time. The final scenes of the film show the home-made cinema return for an evening, this time to show the village their own movies. And this time, they go REALLY potty :)

If there's any criticism that you can level at the film, it's maybe that the film is a little too personal, with Cousin's comparing the experience of growing up in Gop Tapa with his own childhood in 1970s Belfast. A scene with the director addressing the camera directly and reciting a poem was, for me, definitely a step too far. There's also some hand-made CGI in which a village boy is made to fly - this jars when it appears. It ties into an earlier exchange, but it only really made sense when Cousins explained in the Q&A that it was a sequence that had been created with the live showing in mind. It would probably have made more sense and had some impact if the crowd reaction had been caught on camera. But these are minor gripes, because The First Movie is a really charming and beautifully crafted film.

Related links for "The First Movie"

• The First Movie Official Site
• Mark Cousins "On Making The First Movie"
• "The First Movie" IMDB entry
• "Mark Cousins brings a Kurdish lesson in film-making to London" by Peter Bradshow (The Guardian)
• "The First Movie: peace through a child's eye" by Ken Russell (The Times)
• "Palle Alone in the World" (Dir: Astrid Henning-Jensen, 1949)
• "The Boot" (Dir: Mohammad-Ali Talebi, 1992)
• "The Singing Ringing Tree" (Dir: Francesco Stefani, 1957)
• "ET: The Extra Terrestrial" (Dir: Steven Spielberg, 1982)
• "Le Ballons Rouge" (Dir: Albert Lamorisse, 1957)