Career
A prolific producer and director, he is best known for his 15-hour 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Cousins interviewed famous filmmakers such as David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski in the television series Scene by Scene. In 2009, Cousins and actress/director Tilda Swinton created a project where they mounted a 33.5-tonne portable cinema on a large truck and hauled it manually through the Scottish Highlands.
The result was a traveling independent film festival which was featured prominently in a documentary called Cinema is Everywhere.
The festival was repeated again in 2011. His 2011 film The Story of Film: An Odyssey was broadcast as 15 one-hour television episodes on More4, and later, featured at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.
In September 2013, it began to be shown on Turner Classic Movies. After the massive undertaking of The Story of Film, Cousins"s next project was an intentionally small-scale work: What Is This Film Called is a self-photographed travel diary of his three day walk around Mexico City, in which he carries on an imagined conversation with a photo of Sergei Eisenstein.
Another low-budget, quickly produced documentary, Here Be Dragons, covers a short film-watching trip he made to Albania.
6 Desires: Dialectics and Humanism Lawrence and Sardinia is structured around an imagined letter from Cousins to the author Doctorate. H. Lawrence, who wrote about a 1921 visit to Sardinia. Life May Be is a collaboration with Iranian director and actor Mania Akbari, again making use of Cousins"s familiar structural devices of letters, travel imagery, and voiceover commentary. Cousins subsequently produced I Am Belfast, in which the city is personified by a 10,000-year-old woman.
Portions of the film in progress, with a score by Belfast composer David Holmes were screened at the 2014 Belfast Film Festival.
He is also working on a three-hour addendum to The Story of Film, on the subject of documentaries, entitled Dear John Grierson. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he attended Street Louis Grammar School, Ballymena.
He is a graduate of the University of Stirling in Scotland, where he studied film, media, and art Since 1984 he has been in a longterm personal relationship with Gill Moreton, a psychologist, whom he met at Stirling.
They live in Edinburgh.
