Mark Cousins fell in love with movies when he was nine years old, in 1974, as he sat in a cinema on Royal Avenue, in the then Troubles-cursed city of Belfast, watching an extraordinary Volkswagen Beetle save the day in Herbie Rides Again.
The film-maker, the child of a Catholic mother from Falls Road and a Protestant father from Sandy Row, vividly remembers sitting in the dark in the Avenue cinema.
“It was an escape valve. People who really love cinema are often quite shy and introverted, or a lot of them are. I was, certainly. That’s why people love cinema, because you can sit in the dark and you don’t need to have too much.”
Cousins now sits on the board of Belfast Film Festival, an organisation that he has also chaired. Founded in west Belfast by Michele Devlin and Laurence McKeown, the playwright and former IRA hunger striker, the festival spread out into the city as a whole in 2000, and now attracts 25,000 visitors each year.
This year’s festival, the 25th, opens with Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence as a woman who suffers such severe postpa
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