Director and film author Mark Cousins was born in 1965 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Cousins studied Film, Media and Art at the University of Stirling in Scotland before making his debut as a film director. Since 1993, he has made ten films for cinema. He directed twenty seven episodes of the seminal TV series Scene by Scene, interviewing famous actors and legendary directors. Cousins rose to international fame as the director, writer and presenter of the acclaimed, fifteen hour film The Story of Film: an Odyssey (2011), made for British digital TV channel More4 and based on his book The Story of Film (2004). The series was screened in full at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011, as well as exhibited as a piece of video art at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2012). In 2015 Cousins directed I Am Belfast, the story of a 10,000-year-old woman who embodies the city. When he was approached by BBC's Storyville to make a film commemorating the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the beginning of the nuclear age, he didn't have to think long: 'It's a subject which immediately chimed with me. I'm a child of the nuclear age, and in my teens I had nightmares about the bomb. And I've always been fascinated by the world of atoms. To me it was like abstract Star Wars. It didn't take long at all to get the film off the ground.'