22/07/2026 - Mark Cousins invites us to join him on an exciting “road movie” trip through 1980s documentary cinema in the newest section of his 16-hour epic to screen at festivals

There are many ways to tell the story of film – chronologically, thematically or teleologically, to name but a few – but the very act of narrativising usually implies that one is removed from that history. This is why Northern Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins is well suited to narrate the stories of cinema as an artform, as he has done in his monumental The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema and The Story of Film: A New Generation, amongst many other essay films, all confessing his boundless love for the audiovisual medium. Cousins premiered the first section of his 16-hour oeuvre The Story of Documentary Film at Sundance and Berlin, and following a presentation of the 1970s instalment in Cannes Classics, the latest section to be shown to date, The Story of Documentary Film: 1980s, world-premiered at Karlovy Vary and has just screened at the Golden Apricot International Film Festival, where the director received a special award (see the news).

Film history lends itself to a chronological retelling, but does that mean that documentary should, too? From its inception, cinema has recorded the world as it is and as it seems, but the development of documentary as its own kind of cinema (rather than a genre or a movement) cannot be summarised in linear points. Cousins starts his journey through the past, and keeps the trajectory limited to decade after decade, but his intervention has to do with themes, rather than evolution of the form. In The Story of Documentary Film: 1980s, he begins by mentioning 1989 – the Berlin Wall as a thing of the past, a ghost haunting contemporary Berlin in the crisp, digital footage shot by the director himself. He evokes the ghost of things unseen as the defining factor of the decade, leaning into the nature of a film travelogue, a journey across time and space, anchored in clips and commentary.

While this is “signature Mark Cousins” – the zooming in and zooming out of sequences, the close analysis, the questions posed to characters and the films themselves by his calm, inquisitive voice-over – the film’s approach to legacy works beautifully in this instalment. The first hour interrogates social changes and political tides, like second-wave feminism, the Solidarity movement, the AIDS crisis and more, dipping in and out of documentaries from across the globe. Regardless of the short time he spends with each film, Cousins pays so much attention to details, be it atmosphere, framing, characters’ sustained dignity or the role of the spectator. What can be viewed as a flaw in his method, the authoritative subjectivity he speaks with, metaphorically opens up rarely seen films to the audience. In that sense, Cousins is attentive to the canon and how exclusive it can be. 

In the second hour of the chapter, we look at “detective docs” of the 1980s, an umbrella term that allows Cousins to expand the lexicon of his “road movies through cinema history”, while investigating the claims to truthfulness imposed on documentaries. It’s refreshing to see these themes tackled with a kind of poetic appeal to the point where it appears frivolous – the filmmaker addresses the films casually and with awe, like you would a lifelong lover. Yet every bit of this gigantic project is calibrated and plays a structural role: there’s no room for flippancy when you kneel at the altar of cinema.

The Story of Documentary Film was produced by Glasgow-based Hopscotch Films, and Dogwoof handles its international sales.