Dear Orson Welles & Other Essays Mark Cousins in conversation with Grainne Humphreys
In Partnership with Irish Film Institute
In Dear Orson Welles & Other Essays (The Irish Pages Press), acclaimed director and writer Mark Cousins reflects on his prolific career in filmmaking, meditating on the philosophers, writers, actors and films that have influenced him. The essays are in conversation with iconic artistic figures including Orson Welles and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Join Mark in conversation with Grainne Humphreys. Book HERE.
This event will be followed by a screening of I Am Belfast, introduced by Mark – tickets for the screening must be purchased separately from the IFI Box Office HERE.
A globally acclaimed Scottish-Irish director, writer and wanderer, Mark Cousins was born in 1965, raised in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and has lived in Scotland since the early 1980s. His 24 feature-length films (as well as 30 short films) and 40 hours of television including The Story of Film: An Odyssey, What is This Film Called Love?, Life May Be, A Story of Children and Film, Atomic, Stockholm My Love, I Am Belfast and The Eyes of Orson Welles – have premiered in Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and Venice film festivals and have won the Prix Italia, a Peabody, the Persistence of Vision Award in San Francisco, the Maverick Award in Dublin, the Stanley Kubrick Award, and the European Film Academy Award for Innovative Storytelling as well as many other prizes. He has filmed in Iraq, Sarajevo during the siege, Iran, Mexico, across Asia and in America and Europe. Mark Cousins is also the author of five books, including the acclaimed The Story of Film (Pavilion Books, 2004), Imagining Reality:The Faber Book of Documentary (Faber and Faber, 1996), Widescreen: Watching. Real. People. Elsewhere (Wallflower Press, 2008) and The Story of Looking (Canongate Books, 2017). He continues to live in Edinburgh.
Grainne Humphreys is Executive Director of the Dublin International Film Festival. She started her career working with young audiences with the Junior Dublin Film Festival in 1994 and she has worked in film programming for over 30 years. She was director of both the Stranger Than Fiction Documentary Festival and the Dublin French Film Festival from 2002- 2007. She is a regular contributor on a range of cinema and culture related subjects to a number of radio shows on RTE and other media outlets and leads a course called Cinema Creatives which is a part of the Creative Futures Academy in UCD. She also lectures on film exhibition in Griffith College.