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Mark Cousins's film exploring childhood and film is dazzling in its breadth and intelligence

While I have always held that film-makers and film critics are fundamentally different beasts (and should ideally be kept in separate cages), Mark Cousins brilliantly bridges the divide between the disciplines, his screen work existing in a distinctive space between creation and commentary. An encyclopedic cineaste who is as happy watching movies as making them, Cousins has carved out a niche as the great chronicler of the medium, with The Story of Film: An Odyssey confirming him as a modern poet of the moving image. This latest visual essay (which builds upon the enchanting explorations of The First Movie) teases away at the portrayal of children on screen, drawing upon a breathtaking knowledge of international cinema which allows Cousins to connect fleeting glances across continents, decades and film formats: from Ozu to Spielberg to Panahi...

Gentle and ruminative, this documentary from Mark Cousins takes a rich and clever look at how children appear on screen

This utterly beguiling and idiosyncratic cine-essay by critic and film-maker Mark Cousins is a personal journey through the subject of children on film. It was first shown at last year's Cannes film festival and is now on release here: a brilliant mosaic of clips, images and moments chosen with masterly flair, and accompanied by Cousins' own gentle, ruminative, almost murmured voiceover. Just as in his mighty television series, A Story of Film, Cousins dances nimbly between films old and new, cleverly intuits the connections, and digresses into the history of art, as well as into that of his own family.

A Story of Children and Film could be read as simply the story of Cousins himself, through film, and his own refusal to reproduce the cynical/knowing tone of modern grownup criticism.

Edinburgh exhibitor Filmhouse is to tour a season of films about childhood across the UK, curated by documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins.

The season will comprise 17 films about childhood (see below for full list).

Most of the titles in the season are featured in Cousins’ documentary A Story of Children and Film, which premiered at Cannes last year.

The April-June tour will take in London, Belfast, Cardiff, Nottingham, Glasgow, Brighton, Bristol and Sheffield among other cities.

The season is managed by Filmhouse, which has also licensed VoD rights to a number of the titles.

The project is backed by the BFI’s Programming Development Fund. Adam Dawtrey and Mary Bell, who also produced A Story of Children and Film, are producers.

The full list of titles screening in the Cinema of Childhood season are:

• “Willow and Wind” (Bid-o Baad). Iran, Japan, 1999. D. Mohammad-Ali Talebi. 77 mins. A boy breaks a school window, and must mend...

This German animation about a lunar visitor to Earth is a sweet and eccentric alternative to Hollywood children's fare

Der Mondmann, or Moon Man, is a quirky new children's animation from Germany, now redubbed into English, based on the 1967 picture book by the French illustrator Tomi Ungerer. The movie has an oddball charm and innocence; it is like a footnote to Spielberg's Et, and looks to me a little like Astrid Henning-Jensen's 1940s children's fantasy Palle Alone in the World, a movie featured in Mark Cousins's recent cine-essay A Story of Children and Film. The man in the moon makes a trip to Earth, which is governed by a preposterous megalomaniac "President", who is himself obsessed with conquering the moon, and bullies a reclusive scientist into inventing a "rocket" to help him to get up there. Weirdly, despite its lack of progress with space-travel technology, this alternative-reality Earth...

Critic and director Mark Cousins is receiving rave reviews at Cannes for his inspirational film about cinema and childhood. He tells Charlotte Higgins why it's the decade of the cine-essay

You can tell a lot about Mark Cousins from his tattoos. The Edinburgh-based, Belfast-born presenter, critic and film-maker, whose richly poetic A Story of Children and Film has just premiered to five-star reviews at Cannes, has arms inscribed with words. There's "Forough" on his right. That's Forough Farrokhzad, "the first great Iranian film director," he says. "Her The House Is Black is one of the greatest movies ever made." On his left there's "Le Corbusier", the French architect; and "Eisenstein", the Russian director about whom he recently made a film while undertaking a three-day tramp through Mexico City.

Then, on the inside of his left arm, are the words "the oar and the winnowing fan". This is a reference to...

While planning a trip to a village in rural Iraq to show films to children who had never seen any before, Mark Cousins had to decide which films to show them. Here's what he chose

What are the best kids' films ever made? I had to answer this question about 18 months ago when I was planning a trip to a village in the Kurdish part of northern Iraq, to make a little tented outdoor cinema there. I wanted to entertain the kids in the village by showing them films, and I filmed them watching the movies for my new documentary, The First Film. None of them had ever been to the cinema before, and I had just three nights – so what would I show?

My first choice was easy. There's a Danish film called Palle Alone in the World, about a wee boy who wakes up one morning to find all the adults have disappeared.

The exuberant film critic's tremendous new documentary The First Movie records the triumph of imagination, even over war

Not many critics also get to be accomplished film-makers, but one such is Mark Cousins, a brilliantly exuberant movie writer whose passionate, celebratory and sensual relationship with the cinema is, I think, a refreshing corrective to the over-snarky tendencies of Fleet Street criticism. Many will know him from the sadly defunct BBC series Scene by Scene, which ran from 1996 to 2001, from his excellent one-volume cinema history The Story of Film and also from his collaborative partnership with Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton. It was this partnership which gave birth to the Nairn film festival.

This was, and is, an ongoing experiment in reinventing cinema as a grassroots audience experience, a way of bringing the cinema to people without the intermediate commercial panoply of exhibitors and distributors. Cousins and Swinton created a travelling roadshow,...