“A terrifically enjoyable and engaging film: open-minded and open-hearted, and utterly unlike the material on regular commercial release”

“A woozy, dream-like, magical-realist movie which demonstrates that despite living amid a landscape of conflict, the minds of the children are ‘like Aladdin's caves’ ”

David Jenkins in Time Out

“This charming documentary on innocence and image-making from that venerable Northern Irish critic/filmmaker Mark Cousins offers rich insights into how we produce and consume cinema. Referencing Dennis Hopper’s acid-fried deconstruction of the filmmaking process, ‘The Last Movie’ (1971), in its title, Cousins follows in the trail of the late wild man to the war-ravaged rural border town of Goptapa in Kurdish Iraq…”

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Kate Muir in The Times

“In The First Movie, the director Mark Cousins arrives in a Kurdish village in Iraq, sets up a makeshift outdoor cinema for children, and then gives the local kids hand-held cameras to make mini-movies. The village bakes at 40C in a valley where — amid grazing cows and pomegranates — Saddam Hussein once dropped chemical weapons. Many of the older generation were wiped out or damaged. But the children are wild, eccentric and joyful…”

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Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

“Mark Cousins’ documentary about taking films to an Iraqi village – where none of the children have seen one before – makes for entertaining and uplifting film, says Peter Bradshaw.
Part documentary, part interactive educational project, this is an entirely admirable film by Mark Cousins…”

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