In among Venice‘s typically stellar documentary line-up was Northern Irish director Mark Cousins’ next film: Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema.
More details are emerging today about the episodic 16-hour documentary, whose first four hours will debut on the Lido and be narrated by Tilda Swinton. The film will celebrate female directors from around the world.
The project is produced by Hopscotch Films, with Dogwoof handling world sales. Swinton will also serve as an executive producer on the movie, which is debuting in Venice’s Classics strand.
Cousins writes and directs, with John Archer from Hopscotch producing. Four years in the making and still in production, the finished film will be ready in spring 2019.
The epic undertaking is made up of forty chapters to be narrated by Swinton and other leading women in cinema who have yet to be announced. According to the production, “using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and five continents, the film will show how films are made, shot and edited; how stories are shaped and how movies depict life, love, politics, humour and death, all through the lens of some of the world’s greatest women directors.”
Among female directors spotlighted in the film will be Agnes Varda, Jane Campion, Angelina Jolie, Lynne Ramsay, Sally Potter, Lois Weber, Anne Hui, Safi Faye, Mania Akbari, Binka Zhelyazkova and Clio Barnard.
Cousins’ previous movies include The Eyes Of Orson Welles, which played at Cannes this year, The Story Of Film: An Odyssey and I Am Belfast.
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