Documentarian Mark Cousins received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award for his contribution to the art of film at the opening ceremony of the Sarajevo Film Festival on Friday night. The decision to honour Cousins here was especially meaningful, because his love of cinema has had a very tangible impact on Sarajevo, and local resistance through creativity has in turn had a strong influence on him. He elaborated on this, and the myriad other passions that drive his work, in a wide-ranging masterclass on his career held on Sunday in the Bosnian Cultural Center, housed in a former synagogue, and moderated by Bulgarian film academic Dina Iordanova.
Cousins visited Sarajevo in 1994, when he was still in his twenties and was director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It was the height of the Siege of Sarajevo, when Serb forces surrounded, blockaded and assaulted the city for 1,425 days. Cousins visited the Obala Art Centar cinema, where films were screened for besieged citizens. The Sarajevo Film Festival grew out of this cultural hub, and Cousins was instrumental in rallying support internationally for its launch.
Sectarian violence is not new to Cousins, who grew up during The Troubles in Ireland, in a working-class family with a Catholic mother and Protestant father. “I was tenderised in Belfast,” he said. “The only place I felt safe and relaxed was in a cinema space, where I could be entranced by the magic carpet ride of the movie screen, and that is one of the reasons I fell in love with cinema.”
But this did not prepare him for ‘90s Sarajevo. “When I came here I felt like I’d been awakened. I saw the full spectrum of life, and felt it was the worst place I’d ever been. The tragedy, terror, aggression, and fascism. And yet within that, the wild creativity of the Obala Art Centar people. The complexity and amplitude of the experience has stayed with me today, and the way the people defied the Serb aggressors, saying ‘You will not snuff us out, we will live fully.’”
Cousins’s recent documentary The March on Rome (2022) screened in Sarajevo’s Dealing With the Past section, an annual side-bar of international work curated to facilitate dialogue, reconciliation and healing in the former Yugoslav region from its own painful history. The film employs his signature mix of archive, astutely rewatched for telling detail, and musing voiceover, in this instance to chart the rise of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, and the way in which footage was manipulated into propaganda that enhanced an illusion of his populist might.
“Fascism will always be defeated and lose in the end, but it always pops up somewhere else in a new form,” said Cousins of his urge to tackle the subject, during this time of a resurgent far right in Europe.
A prolific documentarian, Cousins has made numerous films about cities, including I Am Belfast (2015), a mythic, poetically associative take on Northern Ireland’s capital, personified as a 10,000-year-old woman whose voiceover takes us meandering through the streets. His idiosyncratic, enthusiastic meditations on the way in which cinema gives us eyes to see things anew have also underpinned a number of works on the history of film, most notably his fifteen-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), and his fourteen-hour Women Make Film (2018), which foregrounds the work of 183 female directors sidelined from official history.
Bringing work from marginalised voices and perceived peripheries to more mainstream attention, and in turn, improving access to global culture in isolated places, has always been a major concern of Cousins. As well as his involvement in maintaining a cinematic bridge during Sarajevo’s Siege, he is well-known for the 2009 journey he undertook around the Scottish Highlands with Tilda Swinton, where they manually towed a 33.5-tonne portable cinema to show films to locals in out-of-the-way locations.
“When you come from a place like Belfast you are on an edge, and you feel like a second-class person; you’re a universe away from centres of power like London or New York,” he said. “But from the edge, we can be very good lookers. My favourite subject at school was physics, and I adored Copernicus, the famous Polish astronomer, who asked what if you aren’t the centre of the world, and there are many centres. What if creativity is not about self-expression, but looking outward to other parts of the world, to see what’s out there?”
