Mark Cousins doesn’t hold with the old movie maxim “never work with children or animals”.

“It’s like saying never work with an unpredictable actor,” he says as he launches his personally curated Cinema Of Childhood movie strand as part of Brighton Festival.

“It’s harder to work with children and animals, but that’s where the magic lies. The only people who would say that are likely to be producers or directors, who like to be in control. Directors who want to put unpredictable reality into their films will work with children and animals.”

Ever since his first directing project for BBC Scotland in the late 1980s and his 2009 feature debut The First Movie, which saw youngsters in a Kurdish-Iraqi village documenting their lives on camera, Cousins has enjoyed working with children.

“What a director is trying hardest to do is create vitality or life within the frame,” he says. “One of the best ways of doing that is putting a child there. If a film is looking a bit inert or flat, put a child in there and all hell breaks loose – there’s mayhem and anarchy.”

The way children are portrayed on film has changed a lot since the days of box office gold child stars such as Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney.

“Those children were working in a big studio set-up,” says Cousins. “They couldn’t do whatever they wanted and be reckless.

“Now digital technology and smaller equipment has come along. If you get children in the right mood they will improvise and adlib. A director shouldn’t get in the way of them being themselves – once you have created the right mood, they forget they are being filmed.”

For adult audiences, watching children on film can be about remembering how they were at that age.

“I think we are jealous of them,” he says. “They get to play and mess around and do all the silly things we as adults would like to do. George Bernard Shaw once said we don’t stop playing because we grow old – we grow old because we stop playing.”

The Cinema Of Childhood touring festival is being supported by Filmhouse Edinburgh over the next 12 months.

It follows the launch of the Eight And A Half Found-ation, which Cousins began in 2009 with long-time collaborator Tilda Swinton to introduce children aged eight upwards to world cinema.

And he has frequently championed so-called children’s cinema at film festivals around the world.

“Some people think if a film is about children or for a child it must be lesser art,” he says. “This is rubbish – the films I have selected are just fantastic pieces of cinema. They have the vitality of Singin’ In The Rain, or the intensity you get from a film like Bicycle Thieves. This is a chance of a lifetime to see this stuff.”

He deliberately shied away from screening classic but much-seen children’s films such as ET, The Red Balloon or Kes, instead favouring lesser-known arthouse movies from Albania, Iran, Japan, Scandinavia, Poland and the US. Many have never been screened in the UK before.

“I saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2 yesterday,” says Cousins. “In that film the whole city of New York is in jeopardy.

“In the season we have Willow And Wind, which is about one little boy in danger. With Willow And Wind I was far more engaged, wringing my hands and nervous. It isn’t about the scale of the thing, a hero doesn’t have to be about to change the world.

It can be about a little red boot or a goldfish.

“A child in Europe doesn’t really understand about issues in Africa or India, but they understand small things like they want pizza and can’t get it, or they aren’t allowed to play on their Xbox in the evening. Those little things are so universal.”

Taking children seriously

He feels the films he has chosen question what children are really like. He has avoided films like Shane, where the young boy in the movie is more of a symbol than a character, or The Omen, where an adult is using the child as a fantasy of evil.

“The films I have chosen often don’t have many grown-ups in them,” he says. “The adults are detached in some way, which is the exciting thing.

“The films for Cinema Of Childhood are made for everyone. And people looking seriously at movies have to look at children’s cinema otherwise they are missing out on something central to cinema.”

His own particular highlights from the season include Crows, which he describes as astonishing. “People when they see it ask why they haven’t seen it before.”; Willow And Wind, which received a five-star review in The Guardian when Cousins screened it earlier this year; and Tomka And His Friends, which is receiving its UK premiere as part of the festival.

“It’s young boys fighting the Nazis – it’s a great thriller,” he says. “The director has been making films for 30 years – he’s a major discovery. I wanted films that weren’t masterpieces in their own right, but were absolutely great.”

  • Cinema Of Childhood, Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Brighton, until Saturday, May 24. Call 01273 709709 or visit brightonfestival.org