GFF10 In Focus: Mark Cousins

Tell me how you came to find the village of Goptapa where you filmed?

We drove around lots of towns and villages in Iraqi Kurdistan. Many of them were beautiful, some even looked like Positano in Italy. Soon I realised that I needed to set the film in a microcosm, a small place, so that ruled out the towns. Then I met the little boy, Mohamed, in Goptapa, and liked his openness and way of speaking. Then there were its cinematic qualities and its extraordinary panorama.

As well as encouraging the children to get involved in the filmmaking you also brought a mobile cinema with you and showed five films about childhood  – did you receive any reactions you weren’t expecting? Were you worried about showing ET given the complex relationship between America and Iraq?

I chose what I think are the 5 best kids' films ever made. I knew I didn't want to show too many Euro-American films, because that would have suggested that we are best at such films, which we aren't. I was surprised by nearly everything about the screenings – that so many kids came, that kids only came, that three-year-olds came, and that they screamed and cheered. They LOVED the Iranian film in particular [The Boot by Mohamad Ali Talebi] – and that part of the world has a complex relationship with Iran. But the kids just looked at the films as stories. Kurdish Iraq does not hate America, so I wasn't really worried about the response to ET. I showed it, to be honest, because it has great bike scenes in it, and the kids of Goptapa love bikes.

There are some wonderfully playful moments in the film – am I right in saying that there’s a shot near the beginning which is played in reverse so a passing car goes backwards?

Yes! We reversed that shot and quite a few others – the one where the girl pops red balloons into life, a dream sequence where fireworks implode and the flight of the bird that appears quite often. I love the simple magic of the films of Jean Cocteau, especially The Blood of a Poet, which has lots of reverse action footage, and I even like the films of George Méliès, from the very first years of cinema, the 1890s. The techniques are so simple, so child-like. What is slightly unusual, perhaps, is to use such techniques in a documentary film. But documentary is about seeing, and we see magical things, we sometimes see as kids see, we misrecognise things all the time, or at least I do! And the things we see by day loom up, or run backwards, as comedy or tragedy, in our dreams, and I was trying to film those too.

How did you find filming in Iraq? There is a mention at one point of the authorities asking you to stop – did you encounter them again later on?

It wasn't an easy shoot, for various reasons. The heat (40-43?C) was too much for a peeley-walley Celt like me, there were killer scorpions on the floor where I slept and the mosquitoes and bites were annoying. It was the secret police that stopped our filming twice. They were suspicious of us because we were there for 3 weeks perhaps (news crews hang around for a few days), and because, I suspect, they thought that our filming of kids was a cover for something more subversive. The Kurdish Regional Government gave us full permission, but there are layers of authority there. We stopped and politely waited until our production team challenged the ruling.

You previously took films to show in Sarajevo – how did this experience compare to your time in Goptapa?

Both were inspiring. Both made me believe that in tough times, culture and cinema are not just luxuries, they are sustaining signs that war can't get purchase on every aspect of our lives, that its tide goes out.

Whilst some critics have bemoaned the decline of 35mm, you’ve embraced the use of digital here. Do you feel positive about the creative changes that technology is allowing filmmakers?

We have used digital in two ways here. Firstly, to make a landscape film which is responsive to old stuff like the light at dusk, the gloaming, the lengthening of shadows, etc. Secondly, to tell stories from a new perspective – that of kids living in a traumatised and beautiful place in a corner of one of the most famous countries in the world. I think digital is good at both, the old and the new. It is very welcoming to new filmmakers like the lovely kids I worked with, and yet tolerant of oldies like me who, when they look through a viewfinder, have a head full of Cocteau, Méliès and The Night of the Hunter! It's a great time for cinema and digital technology can take some of the credit for that.