JAMES Bond legend Sean Connery once said of Harrogate Film Festival’s forthcoming star guest, "Mark Cousins is incapable of writing anything about cinema history without making it fascinating".

Film maker and cultural critic Cousins is visiting the town on March 4 for a special event in conjunction with Harrogate Film Society and Harrogate Advertiser features editor and film buff Graham Chalmers.

Mark Cousins In Conversation With Graham Chalmers will be held at 7.30pm in the Starling Independent Bar Cafe Kitchen, in Harrogate, to be followed by a screening of Cousins’ Cannes Film Festival award-winning 2018 film The Eyes Of Orson Welles.

Connery's praise for Cousins came when talking about his 2004 book The Story Of Film, which takes the reader from the silent era to the computer-aided medium of today, on the way giving as much weight to Asian cinema as Hollywood, showing how cinema evolved from Griffith to Almodovar.

York Press:

The film poster for Mark Cousins' documentary The Eyes Of Orson Welles

A noted champion of world cinema, Cousins said: "I wanted to write a pure book, one more focused on the medium than the industry."

Cousins is not only a leading British director and cultural commentator but also a contributor to BBC 4, BBC 2 and More 4 through series such as Scene By Scene, Moviedrome and The Story Of Film: An Odyssey and he has directed the Edinburgh International Film Festival too.

In the past 20 years, Cousins has worked with film makers David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski, actress Tilda Swinton, musician Nenah Cherry, rock band Mogwai and Orson Welles’ daughter Beatrice on a huge variety of films, such as A Story Of Film And Children and Atomic Living In Dread And Promise.

Tickets for Harrogate Film Festival are on sale at harrogatefilm.co.uk.