Five Indian films, all
made in Mumbai but disparate in spirit and substance, became the part of
Belfast-born, Edinburgh-based filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins’ 160-minute
documentary, ‘The Story of Film: A New Generation’.

The documentary is a
part of the Cannes Classics section and opens with a shot of the new cinematheque
in Madrid, reports PTI.

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‘A New Generation’, a
follow-up to Cousins’ 15-hour magnum opus ‘The Story of Film: An Odyssey’
(2011), tracks the creative innovations, technological advancements, and new
ways of seeing in an image-intensive, attention-deficient digital age.

The documentary also
focuses extensively on Asian and Arab films and cites Anurag Kashyap’s
five-hour ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’, Rajkumar Hirani’s ‘PK’, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s
‘Goliyon ki Rasleela Ram-Leela’, Anand Gandhi’s ‘Ship of Theseus’ and Anand
Patwardhan’s brilliant documentary ‘Reason’ among the most important films of
the current era.

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It has been made
during the pandemic and also features memorable movie moments. The documentary
had its world premiere on the opening day of the 74th Cannes Film Festival

‘A New Generation’ is
written, photographed, and narrated by Cousins who sees ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ as
“one of the most complex” gangster films in the 80 years since the
birth of the genre.

Also, the film
features “most elaborately choreographed song” from ‘Ram-Leela’.

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The filmmaker
describes a “tonal shift” in PK as “one of the biggest… in
contemporary cinema”.

Cousins has another
film in Cannes Classics this year – ‘The Storms of Jeremy Thomas’, a
documentary on the prolific British producer who has over the past five decades
collaborated with a few of the world’s greatest filmmakers, notably Bernardo
Bertolucci, Nagisa Oshima, Wim Wenders, Lars von Trier, and David Cronenberg.